Price Anderson – American Disasters

January 25, 2014December 16, 2020

The perverse and often baffling economics of disasters

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As someone who has completed an economics minor, I can tell you little about the economy or economics or finance or international trade with much confidence. I can, however, say with complete confidence that economics is an odd discipline. It’s hyper-rationality embraces only empirical judgments of the economy while simultaneously validating people’s subjective values as determinant of welfare. In Kevin Rozario’s “What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters Have Been Good for American Capitalism,” we catch a glimpse of the strangeness of economics, and indeed of capitalism itself.

Rozario seeks to show how disasters, but especially the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, had positive economic impacts, among other effects. He makes the case that with a disaster, the destruction of existing capital draws in funds from elsewhere to rebuild an even more productive environment. Though this may be true, anyone can easily tell that a disaster is not good news in the broadest sense. Resources exist and can be destroyed; that loss does not disappear once the city is rebuilt. At the very least, readers can acknowledge that, economics aside, a disaster represents the loss of natural resources, and the person-hours that were put into the construction and development of that capital. Moreover, it often results in the loss of human life.

Most interestingly, Rozario draws parallels between disasters and capitalism. Both are destructive: disasters raze buildings and destroy the capital within, while capitalism encourages the constant renewal of technologies and spaces to better produce the newest and most effective widgets. He points out, as examples, the ability of Bostonians to widen their streets after one fire, or more prominently, the efforts of progressives to improve San Francisco’s urban space in the aftermath of the earthquake and related fire.

In examining the opportunity offered by a disaster to sculpt the urban landscape, we see that the desires of those sculptors was inherently opposed to the capitalist ethos: Haussmann and the progressives of San Francisco wanted to make permanent changes to the city, for a variety of purposes. They wanted to create cities which withstood the test of time and served to benefit the city (and the owning class). Yet, the vision of cityscape which endures the test of time stands in direct opposition to capitalism, which desires the continual renewal of technology, business, commerce, and therefore urban spaces.

It is also telling that the so-called progressives of San Francisco cared as little about the effect of their plans on the working class as did Haussmann, though at least they did not blast away their housing with cannon. Indeed, throughout his article, Rozario makes it clear that the poor suffered, even as the economy, the city, and the business class benefitted in the aftermath of the ravages of disasters.

I enjoyed CT’s analysis of the art on the spoons at the State of Emergency exhibit, and I think that he is apt in his analysis of the spoon and its role in the artwork: as a domestic item, it seems particularly at home depicting a tornado, perhaps because so much of the destruction of tornados, as CT points out, happens in the midwest, away from major bodies of water. Such areas tend to be less urban, and often symbolize the domestic of American society.

January 23, 2014December 16, 2020

Art and history: an experiential bridge

I visited the State of Emergency exhibit a few minutes ago, and it was very interesting. I thought that the exhibit with the legal pads inscribed with lines which were actually tiny lines of text was fascinating, as was the exhibit on fracking.

The piece that spoke to me the most was the on e entitled “London 1940, Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, Southwark, Waterloo.” Here, the artist used pages of a book that takes place in World War 2 London, and then built a replica of some of London neighborhoods out of that paper. He then burnt the paper in order to show the devastation of the bombings, using maps of London that had data on where bombs had fallen and the destruction that they had caused.

It is one thing to read about the bombing of a city, and to learn the number of bombs dropped, their explosive power in megatons of TNT, the number of deaths, the cost of the damage, the historic sites which were destroyed, or the other endless statistics. A story might do such a situation more justice, and I think that is what Kurt Vonnegut attempted to do in Slaughterhouse Five, where Billy Pilgrim wheels dead bodies into piles in the streets of Dresden after spending the night in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

Yet, neither literary nor historical works capture the visceral nature of something like a disaster in the same way that artwork can. Seeing the model of London laid out, I could see the empty spaces where walls and buildings had been, and it felt much more real than ever before, even though I knew previously that London had been ravaged by German bombing. It’s probably something that you can’t understand unless you’ve been there; but I felt closer to it than I did before. I tried to imagine what it was like to have that burn, that bomb, break down that wall across the street, or to walk down a street and see through to the next one, or the one after that, because the buildings in between had been leveled. I thought about what the smoldering edges of burnt paper looked like when the artist was working, and what the wreckage of destroyed buildings looked like after the bombs detonated. Viewing this piece, it made the whole city feel awfully fragile; likely no more fragile than the residents of London felt their homes were when the bombs tore through walls and leveled sturdy buildings.

The decision to use paper on which a story taking place in wartime London was brilliant. The lives and stories which existed on the paper are untold, as were the stories that were cut short or drastically changed by World War Two.

History is so often an examination of human lives and experiences in an unemotional way. This intellectualization is, of course, useful. By distancing ourselves, we can think well about the situation, and therefore, about future situations. If we truly felt the horror of most disasters, we could likely never process enough to contemplate what we could do to avert future possible similar disasters. Yet, part of understanding a disaster (or any situation) is understanding what it felt like to be there. Art has the ability to connect us in a way that academic literature cannot, in a way that even talented fiction writers often do not achieve. “London 1940” is a great example of this: it connected me, at an emotional, visceral, real level with the destruction of London, and helped me to see a sliver of a disaster through which I did not live, but which I would certainly like to understand.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Historicization in historical study versus popular imagination

All three articles for Thursday’s reading examine the ways in which we think about history and the lenses through which we examine it. Rebecca Edwards, of New Spirits fame, continues the thoughtful discussion that we have been having as a class about whether the moniker of “Gilded Age” is appropriate for the time period we are discussing. Rightly, she argues, as we have discussed, that the most prominent Gilded Age stereotypes do not fully characterize the era. To wit, she raises the Grange movement, the Populist party, the American Farmer’s Alliance, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and muckraking journalism, among other items.

Edwards’ ardent argument regarding historicization of the Gilded Age clearly emerges from a depth of knowledge, and I don’t seek to reject her interpretation out of hand; yet, I think that her frustration with existing perspectives on the Gilded Age comes from teachers and students, not from historians. The dominant narrative of the Gilded Age, which Edwards’ glosses in her opening paragraphs, does not, I believe, dominate the historical literature inappropriately. Rather, the nuance with which Edwards would like students of history to examine the Gilded Age is lost in the shuffle of high school classes which cover American history from colonialism to the eve of World War 2. Unfortunately, that lost nuance drives popular perception of the Gilded Age as one of pure corruption, crony capitalism and Jim Crow. Yet, serious students of history still examine these issues with the perceptiveness and depth which Edwards desires. It is simply not reasonable to expect that the nation as a whole will embrace a complex vision of each era of history when eras themselves tend to get reduced down to their very essence by teachers who must move through them in a week.

I fully agree with Price’s perspective that the Supreme Court’s conservative decisions during this period eviscerated the ability of reformers to make serious legislative progress. His analysis is also apt in that he acknowledges the inadequacies of Edwards’ argument regarding the significance of reform in this period. I would like to reiterate my own perspective: the dominant narrative of this period does not eliminate the possibility of the existence of counter-narrative occurrences; rather, the dominant narrative exists because is most accurately summarizes the dominant trends in Gilded Age society.