jomarsh – American Disasters

April 15, 2014December 16, 2020

Mary Mallon’s Forced Isolation as a Typical Gilded Age Disaster

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For my chapter I’ve chosen to read “Extraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers,” which discusses Mary Mallon’s place in the history and role in evolution of public health policy. I was especially motivated to examine this chapter because it seemed to be somewhat of a departure from the more culturally grounded historical approach I’ve been taking in my project.

Ironically, I found the chapter to be especially interesting due to its cultural implications. It informs an understanding of Gilded Age culture’s conduciveness to disaster. More specifically, the isolation of Mary Mallon, if considered a disaster, demonstrates the pitfalls of the Gilded Age belief in the infallibility of science, or scientific method, to solve any problem. If I remember correctly, this concept been discussed in quite a few class discussions and likely some blog posts.

This way that this belief in the infallibility of science contributed to Gilded Age disasters is seen in the Galveston Hurricane and the city planners’ refusal to appreciate the environmental dangers of the city’s location, the “unsinkable” Titanic, and faith in the damn overlooking Johnstown.

As argued in “Extraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers,” Mary Mallons capture and subsequent isolation can be viewed as a manifestation of the belief that it was possible for humankind to conquer disease. This was due to the confidence brought about by rapid scientific advancement, particularly in the field of bacteriological studies. By choosing to ignore Mallon’s constitutional rights and freedoms for exclusively scientific reasons, the New York City Board of Health and, insomuch as it tolerated this injustice, society on the whole, allowed a belief in the exclusive ability of science to better society to supersede the constitutional rights on which this very same society was founded. In the sense that dismissal of these constitutional rights was, or at the very least had potential to be, disastrous, Mary Mallon’s incarceration was representative of a Gilded Age disaster.

March 17, 2014December 16, 2020

Isaac’s, Stockman’s, Dunwoody’s, and Moore’s Storm

AJ, as Catherine notes, does a good job at placing the Galveston Hurricane in a larger historical context and understanding its larger significance by arguing, “The era that this event occurred in, the way people went about handling the situation and the eventual misjudged outcome, I believe explains a lot about where disaster preparedness was at the time and showed Americans what desperately needed to change.” In doing so he defends, Isaac, who Catherine once again rightly paints as the books antagonist, by understanding the Hurricane’s human toll as largely resultant of the age rather than the actions of a few individuals. It is also a departure from what I understood to be an argument of Larson’s book; that the extent of the destruction can largely be attributable to issues born from individual decisions, namely those of Isaac Cline, William Stockman, H.C.C. Dunwoody, and Willis Moore. This is well evidenced in Larson’s desire to draw attention to the truthfulness of Isaac’s story concerning the his role in the warning of the hurricane; on page 168 and 169 he discusses how the inconsistencies between Isaac’s claim that his warnings saved the lives of over 6000 people and the possibility that he didn’t actually warn anyone (and even if he had it wouldn’t have saved 6000 lives). In drawing attention to these inconsistencies, he seems to be using the book as a platform to attack the common historical narrative, a narrative that the weather bureau, as the authority on storms, no doubt played a large role in shaping after the hurricane, and to furthermore place some of the blame onto the individuals who he believed to be disproportionately culpable for the massive losses of human life and destruction. This is also evidenced in the way that he constantly discusses the ways in which Morris’ desire for control, Dunwoody’s careerism, and Stockman’s hubris played in creating a society so vulnerable to disaster. While this desire to attribute personal guilt can be seen as a push back against a narrative that largely painted the disaster as a largely unavoidable societal failing and a call for reform, I believe we must additionally understand it as a product of Larson’s writing style. As was discussed in class and as I discussed in my blog post last week, McCullough’s ability to discuss characters without a disproportionate amount of attention paid to each one helped us, or at least me, to understand the Johnstown flood as a product of societal shortcomings. Conversely, Larson constructs his narrative around the thread of Isaac Cline’s life (going so far as to title his book Isaac’s storm, which in itself implies guilt). This narrative style, which puts such a large focus on one character as a sort of case study, seems to be predisposed by framing more individual guilt than a style, such as McCullough’s, which pays such even attention to such a multitude of characters.

March 12, 2014December 16, 2020

Societal v. Individual Culpability: Parallels between Johnstown’s and Triangle’s Historical Narratives

As Sarah notes in her post, many historians have critiqued McCullough for his writing style for not being truly historical or academic in nature. While some of this criticism is certainly well deserved, I would like to note that his patchwork style is extremely valuable in the way that it allows us to understand the Johnstown Flood as a structural societal fault, rather than one of individual culpability.

One of the largest takeaways from our class discussion on Tuesday was the way in which McCullough was able to effectively diffuse blame among individuals. This was accomplished by skillfully weaving together a narrative that references a multitude of characters rather than focusing on one character that best represents the narrative that he is hoping to portray. No one person’s action is overly singled out as accountable. Interestingly, The Johnstown’s Flood was still able to single out heroic actions. It is this inability to conclusively find fault and this ability to identify heroes that is of great interest to me, particularly in the way that it parallels the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. I recently wrote a paper for another class that attempted to argue that the Triangle Fire is so imprinted into the national memory because of its massive juxtaposition between public understanding and legal recourse. To provide some background the Triangle Fire was a factory fire that resulted in the deaths of 146 women. Importantly, it resulted from an improperly constructed building with a faulty fire escape, locked doors that actually prevented workers from escaping, and a complete lack of any fire protocol or oversight by its owners who were repeatedly warned of its dangers. Yet despite seemingly obviously guilt, no one was charged. This to me was the most interesting; the fire seemed to occupy precisely the point in history at which public understanding outpaced legislation. General public understanding acknowledged the insufficiency and evils of factory conditions and the culpability of owners for consciously risking lives to increase profits, yet, despite this public agreement, legal recourse didn’t exist. To public the Triangle Fire clearly the fault of the individual owners, yet legally it was representative of a societal deficiency that individuals couldn’t be held accountable for. In the same way McCulloughs writing style implicitly argues that the Johnstown Flood, regardless of how many seemingly inexcusable individual faults contributed to its destructiveness was, at its core, a structural flaw in society. As tempting as it is to blame the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, after all they were basely responsible for the dam’s dangerous conditions, McCullough prose seems to suggest that the disaster was truly born from structural flaws. This is strongly paralleled by the way that there was a massive public outcry for the condemnation of the factories owners, yet a preceding report had shown that, relative to other garment factories, the Triangle Factory had far from the most dangerous conditions.

February 25, 2014December 16, 2020

Looking Out for Your Own: Empathy’s Role in Disaster Relief

My paper will seek to understand the role that demographical similarity between those affected by disasters and those responding to disasters plays in the mobilization and formulation of aid and legislation. More specifically, I’m curious if aid is more likely to come from those who are demographically similar to victims. I will examine the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Triangle Fire of 1911. I find these two sources to be of particular interest due to the ways in which their contrasting narratives might manifest themselves into contrasting aid objectives. Much of the narrative surrounding the Chicago Fire centered on upper class hardships due to the removal of social barriers and subsequent abuse by Chicago’s lower class. In contrast the dominant narrative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire centered on the exploitation of the lower class by a predatory and greedy upper class. One of the questions that must be addressed in order to pursue this topic is whether or not differing focuses on aid, in particular maintenance of class boundaries versus lower class protection, developed over time rather than as specific responses to each disaster. More specifically, was the lower class focus of the Triangle Fire’s recovery a product of the ‘progressive era’ rather than specific to the Triangle Fire itself? Conversely, was the upper class focus of the recovery efforts for the Great Chicago Fire stem from the era’s emphasis on speculation and economic productivity over social responsibility? Answers for this question could potentially be found by comparing which organizations led the relief efforts for disasters occurring around the time of the Chicago fire and the Triangle fire. Another question is whether the response to the Chicago Fire even favored the upper class over the lower class? The existence of committees such as the “Special Relief Committee” of the Relief and Aid Society suggests that it might have, though this was only a small facet of the recovery effort. A third question that is extremely central to the overarching thrust of this paper revolves around the rationale of charity. Are people more inclined to provide aid when they can identify with the victims of a disaster? This has important implications for both the Chicago Fire and the Triangle fire; an understanding of who is leading the relief effort is invaluable for understanding the type of relief that the disaster prompted. Primary sources that will be valuable for understanding both this question and the topic on the whole include newspaper articles (particularly whether an event is more likely to be discussed by a progressive or conservative paper), records of donations (who was most compelled to give aid), accounts of rallies or demonstrations following the disaster (the funeral processions following the Triangle Fire were absolutely massive and demonstrate overwhelming conviction despite many of its participants being too poor to donate), and records of the organizations leading the relief effort (the Chicago Fire was led by the a society comprised of industrial leaders, the Triangle fire was led by unions and women’s societies).

February 12, 2014December 16, 2020

Examining the Archetypical Chicagoan

In Carl Smith’s “Faith and Doubt: the Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire,” he discusses two of the major types of responses to the Chicago. The first posits Chicago as a distinctive entity, stresses its God-given destiny as the Queen of the West (some members of this school went so far as to argue that the magnitude of destruction demonstrated Chicago’s preeminence over other major cities, such as Paris, that also experience fires), and reduces its immoral reputation (gambling, prostitution etc.). This view largely ignores class distinctions. Conversely, the second view stresses the dangers of the lower class and explains how, without the social barriers, the lower class is truly as evil (satanic and demon-like were frequent comparisons) as the upper classes feared them to be.

Initially I found these views to be irreconcilable; one is founded on the reduction to an archetypical Chicagoan, while the other is based around the construction of class distinctions and their associated morals. However, after reading Catherine’s post regarding the classism in the Chicago fire, I began to reconsider this distinction. I was particularly interested in her discussion of boosters’ roles in providing a narrative for the Chicago fire and subsequently prompting the recovery effort. It is important to consider that these boosters were targeting upper class Americans capable of investing necessary capital into Chicago. We must then consider that these references to the archetypical Chicagoan were in fact references to the upper class Chicagoan. This would allow these initial two views to become reconcilable.

I would argue that a combination of these views can be understood as a warning against sectionalism within upper class America. By sensationalizing the ways in which the fire destroyed class boundaries, writers reminded other members of the American upper class that their position, like these Chicagoans (who are relatable because of the way that the ‘first view’ stressed their upstanding morals), were in constant jeopardy to the whims of God, Nature, and the subsequent horrors of the class intermingling so well represented by the, often fabricated, stories of crime during the fire. A stress on both Chicago’s upstanding morals and its prior financial eminence is extremely important; by reminding the upper-class of their financial and social frailty it also demonstrated the need for a unity among the upper class.

January 29, 2014December 16, 2020

Relative Abundance: Parallels between Cronon and Rozario

Cronon’s piece does, in my opinion, a remarkable job in salvaging Frederick Jackson Turner’s place in history as an influential historian. This is achieved through a historiographical study of the conditions in which Turner’s thesis emerged and also by studying the different approaches Turner took in writing his books and his essays which help to explain his essay’s somewhat questionable historic methodology as a product of the paper’s goal rather than of Turner’s historical abilities. More so, Cronon notes his ability to unite seemingly separate historical realities into a historical narrative that still endures today. This is not to say that Cronon salvaged the frontier thesis itself. Nor should he have, both AJ and Eli, despite their differing degrees of harshness, are correct in pointing out its flaws.

What interested me most about Cronon’s piece however didn’t necessarily relate to Turner’s work, but rather through a theory that he introduced to better understand Turner’s work. Cronon argues that Turner would have done better to understand the environmental history of North America (western history to Turner) through the lens of relative abundance to scarcity rather than from free to occupied land. He then goes on to more broadly say that “neither abundance nor scarcity has ever been absolute. Instead their definitiions shift always according natural and artificial constraints… and according to peoples beliefs about whether they are experiencing economic…stasis, progress, or decline.” (172) I would like to apply this this concept of understanding historical progress through population’s relative understanding of abundance and scarcity to Rozario’s economic evaluation of disasters.

As we discussed in class, Rozario’s piece can be seen to be potentially flawed because of his overreliance on examples of urban disasters in exceptionally prosperous environments. This criticism is well complemented by Cronon’s observation that people only have a relative understanding of abundance that is largely based on the perceived economic climate. Property in San Francisco and New York was extremely scarce and thus extremely economically valuable because of people’s perceived economic climate. Had New York been in the midst of a depression during the fire, this newly available property would have far less relatively scarce and less valuable. Similarly, a disaster to a relatively unimportant Midwestern town during an economic boon wouldn’t result in increased capital because comparable property is relatively abundant.

January 27, 2014December 16, 2020

Distinguishing Between Planned and Unplanned Destruction of Capital

The argument made in Kevin Rozario’s “What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters have been Good for American Capitalism,” is extraordinarily informative and particularly relevant to the many of us who are American citizens, or who those of us who live in beds of economics growth. But in that relevance lies one of the shortcomings of Rozario’s argument; at many points he seems to attempt to extrapolate the lessons and evidence surrounding the disasters in economic hubs, such as San Francisco or New York City, into a broader understanding of the economic implications of disasters on the whole. I would argue that this evidence speaks less to the general nature of disasters and more towards the “creative destruction” facet of capitalism as it relates to areas of economic interest.

Eli’s blog post noted the parallels between disasters and capitalism present in this article; I found this parallel to be extremely interesting and would like to try to take it a step further by arguing that Rozario, while successful in pointing it out, errors in overemphasizing the parallels between all disasters and all capitalistic endeavors.

When describing the conditions during which New York experienced the New York Fire of 1835 Rozario notes that the City was still economically stimulated by the recent opening of the Erie Canal, that, as a financial center, New Yorkers enjoyed “singular access to international capital,” (79) and that there was abundant credit made available by the expansion of state and “wildcat” banks. All of these features created confidence in a swift recovery that led to little hesitance to rebuild. Similarly, when discussing San Francisco Rozario quotes a writer for the Times who noted that San Francisco’s natural advantages (its location as a hub of trade for the entire west coast) ensured its recover rather than an “artificial enhancement by investment.” Rozario’s evidence is centered on disasters in uniquely valuable locations.

Citing little other evidence he combines this analysis of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the New York Fire of 1835 with theoretical economic analysis from reputable thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter, John Stuart Mills, and Karl Marx concerning the necessity of “creative destruction” (Shumpter) or the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” (Marx). (80) His analysis, which often calls for logical jumps such as substitutions in Marx’s theory (changing “calamity” for “crisis), often stretches what seems to be the initial meaning of these economic theories. By this I mean that these theories seem to refer to destruction as a more controlled and thoughtful decision to replace low-productivity capital with high-productivity capital. Rozario then replaces these conscious decisions for unplanned disasters.

The danger of this sleight of hand in which he equates these unique disasters with all disasters and also replaces conscious destruction with unplanned disasters becomes clear when he argues that “one of the primary benefits of a calamity is that it destroys urban environments and thereby liberates and recycles capital.” It is only in these highly valuable urban spaces such as San Francisco or New York that this land in itself is capital that needs to be liberated. A counterexample is found in the Peshtigo Fire which, though causing up to 2500 deaths and creating a massive loss of capital, in no way “liberated” or “recycled” capital.

January 23, 2014December 16, 2020

The Dangers of Desensitization: Miguel Aragón and the Mexican Drug Wars

The Mexican Drug War is a series of conflicts surrounding the Mexico’s massive illicit drug trade. It involves Mexican drug cartels, the Mexican government, including its army and police forces, Mexican vigilante groups, and the US government. This paper will analyze the disaster that is the Mexican Drug War as it relates to the border city of Ciudad Juarez. While this may seem unnecessarily limited in scope, an examination of Ciudad Juarez is valuable both because it is the artist Miguel Aragón’s native city and thusly the subject of his work and because of the exceptionality of its violence (it was only recently surpassed as the murder capital of the world).[1] The 10,500 murders it saw between 2007 and 2012 stemmed largely from the feuding between two rival drug cartels, the Sinola and Juarez Cartels, but also from a culture of violence that seems to target female victims with impunity from legal recourse. In fact the term “femicide,” which refers to the “misogynous murder of women by men, was coined in response to Cuidad Juarez’s largely publicized frequency of female murders which that failed to receive adequate governmental attention.

Miguel Aragón’s work can be used to argue for an examination of the ways in which the media’s disaster coverage and also stress the importance of the media’s role in disaster response. His art is created by taking grotesque images of victims published by the media and, through a process of laser burning on to cardboard and then imprinting the resulting soot onto paper, creates a sort of negative that, though portraying the same image, forces the viewer to more thoughtfully evaluate what they are seeing. His method is vastly important to this argument; by choosing to retool images that have already been published by the mainstream media, his art acknowledges the necessity of the media’s publicizing of brutality while simultaneously expressing the need to alter their message. This can be understood as a warning against the dangers of desensitization for two reasons. Firstly, by muffling the image and thus muting the brutality, he forces the viewer to fully investigate the image in order to ascertain what it portrays. In doing so the reader must fully consider the images implications in a way that might otherwise be unlikely given the dearth of grotesque images that the viewer is likely to reflexively ignore due to a desensitization to such emotionally taxing images.

Additionally he removes defining facial features; this allows for increased empathy from the viewer by portraying victims as a relatable human form rather than someone of a distinctive background. This is a particularly interesting feature of his artwork when considering in conjunction with the danger of desensitization; as grotesque images become ever more circulated, Aragón’s art serves as a reminder of the ways in which people can compartmentalize violent disaster images so as to maintain a barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in order to reduce psychological anguish. By removing the ‘us’ and ‘them’ the viewer is forced to reconsider the implications of this particular disaster.

This message is particularly important in a city that seems to embody desensitization. Despite, at its peak, seeing nine homicides a day, most of which were organized executions, Cuidad Juarez provided little support for its residents. Not only are “femicides” rarely investigated but the city still fails to receive adequate aid due to inexcusably rampant corruption. The local police force formed a crime collective that was employed by the Juarez Cartel, the federal police force and army often utilized torture and planted false evidence in order to extort money, and federal prosecutors took on far less than one percent of the murder cases.[2]

Although Cuidad Juarez could benefit most from this argument of desensitization, it is not to say that these lessons should be contained to the disasters of Juarez or even of the Mexican Drug War. Rather, due to the increased degree with which media pervades daily life and frequency with which it reports on disasters this danger of desensitization is becoming all the more relevant.

[1] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/15/mexicos-ciudad-juarez-is-no-longer-the-most-violent-city-in-the-world/

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-mexicos-murder-city-the-war-appears-over/2012/08/19/aacab85e-e0a0-11e1-8d48-2b1243f34c85_story.html

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Questioning the Causality of a Changing Political Economy

Blog Post for 01/23/14

I found myself to be particularly intrigued by the discussion concerning the merit of greed during the Gilded Age during class on Tuesday. Particularly whether or not the newfound focus on capital accumulation, or what some might call greed, was either 1.) an inherently unnecessary evil 2.) a good in itself or 3.) a necessary component of economci progress that, while often having immoral motivations, is beneficial on the macro-level. Richard Schneirov’s article entitled Thought on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898 provides intriguing ideas to help us address this question. Ultimately his work seems to point towards the third understanding that posits as a necessary component of economic progress

Schneirov defines the Gilded Age as book-ended by two important transitions: a shift from a “self-employed” (196) mode of production to a capitalist one and from a proprietary competitive capitalist order to a corporate administered one. While both of these transitions are relevant to the question at hand, the first transition to a capitalist mode of production is of particular interest in the way that it illuminates the necessity of capital accumulation as an engine of progress. Schneirov, borrowing from Marx’s Capital, explains the progression from “simple commodity production” (199) where capital is merely a medium of exchange so as to procure commodity of equal value (C-M-C) and capitalism in which capital is invested into commodity in hopes of a profit (M-C-M). Fundamental to “simple commodity production” was an understanding among citizens that labor created value and that ethical exchange should thusly be equal. Schneirov points out the errors of this belief in noting that this supposed theft from producers was what modern economists would understand to be “the economy’s surplus, the sine qua non and the engine of progress and development.” (199) This understanding leads to an extraordinarily interesting notion concerning the causality of the economic shift during the Gilded Age; this shift towards a political economy focused on capital accumulation can be seen to have caused, or at the very least allowed for, the rise of big business and industrialization. This contrasts what seems to be a commonly accepted view that industrialization created the greedy economic culture of the Gilded Age. This is important to the question at hand because it demonstrates that a focus on capital accumulation (or what some might label as greed) was a necessary component of economic progress and not an avoidable vice or isolated shortcoming of the Gilded Age.

A question that still needs to be addressed is whether or not a political economy of capital accumulation is, by nature, driven by greed or, conversely, whether or not participants in the economy can invariably aim to maximize profits without being necessarily greedy.

January 15, 2014December 16, 2020

The Importance of Scale in Disaster Appraisal

While discussing the varying criteria with which historians have understood ‘disaster’ Bergman points out that historians “have not advocated a common creed” but rather share a “familiar lexicon” (935). In my opinion this comment, which serves as a keystone to his article, highlights the large role that the scope of a disasters appraisal can play in creating varying historical understandings of the term while still maintaining a “familiar lexicon.” Throughout our class discussion we referenced different ways with which to evaluate disasters. Be it the “common measuring stick” that Bergman labels a calculus of property and lives, or a more nuanced method that evaluates a disaster’s psychological toll, these understandings are dependent on the group that is analyzed. An example of this can be seen in whether or not one considers the displacement and subsequent harm to Native Americans a disaster; it is dependent on whether analysis is limited to the American economy and subsequently American citizens or includes all parties involved. This is also present in both Bergman and Hewitt’s articles. Bergman references many scholars who contend that disasters are, by nature, social. This analysis is dependent on limiting a disasters evaluation to its toll on humans rather and discounting the ways in which they affect other species, so long as that doesn’t have a toll on humans (were there no disasters prior to humankind?). Hewitt draws attention to this issue of appraisal in by discussing the ways in which countries might export a dangerous technology, product or waste product despite it being illegal in their own country. This exportation of products that are outlawed so as to prevent disaster, demonstrates a disaster appraisal that, by being limited to a certain group of people, is counterproductive on a larger scale. It additionally highlights the ways in which disaster appraisal and response can create collective action problems and the dangers of inward and narrowly focused evaluations and prescriptions for disasters that Hewitt goes on to discuss in his conclusion.