The front page of the Boston Daily Globe, January 16, 1919. Headline: "Molasses Tank Explosion Injures 50 and Kills 11." Source: newspapers.com

Death on the Assembly Line

Industrial Tragedies in American History

04.12.19

On Wednesday an explosion from a gas leak in Durham, NC killed one person and injured 25 others. Local authorities say the leak started after a construction worker hit a gas line. The explosion occurred soon after.

From explosions to pollution, tragedies like the one in Durham have wreaked havoc on Americans and their communities throughout history. This week, BackStory considers the history of industrial disasters and how they’ve changed the nature of American capitalism.

disaster; labor

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Segments

The Boston Molasses Flood

On a warm day, some say you can still smell molasses in the breeze… 100 years ago, the North End of Boston was the site of a terrible industrial accident after a tank holding tons of molasses ruptured, flooding the streets of the North End with a fast moving wall of liquid sugar. 21 people died and 150 were injured, and the the case drove the first class action suit in American history. Nathan interviews local Boston journalist Cara Giaimo about the industrial accident which entered the city’s folk lore.

Boston; accidents; floods; folklore; industrialization; tragedy

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Announcer 1: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory. Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines, I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian: And I’m Bryan Balogh.

Nathan: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re historians, and each week along with our colleges Ed Ayers and Joanne Freeman, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Brian: And we’re going to start off today with a mystery. On hot days in the North End of Boston, local folk lore says you’ll catch the unmistakable smell of molasses in the breeze.

Cara: Obviously Boston is a really historical city. There are a ton of historical things that happened here that shaped the entire nation. The Molasses Flood is an interesting one, because it was a horrible disaster, tons of people died. It was bloody and scary and gruesome, but at the same time because molasses was involved, people think of it as kind of this funny, tasty experience for people when it was really neither funny nor tasty for the people that were actually there.

Nathan: That’s local journalist Cara Giaimo. She was driven to write about the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 because the industrial accident, which claimed 21 lives, has been remembered if at all as kind of a joke.

Cara: I grew up in Massachusetts, and as the historian Steve Puleo, who wrote kind of the definitive book on it has said, the Molasses Flood is a huge part of the city’s folklore, but not necessarily its heritage, and I’m interested in the difference between those two things, what makes something a good story that people like to kind of tell almost as though it happened in a different dimension.

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cara: What makes something actually a part of a city’s history in a way that makes it included in the story, the larger narrative that that city tells about itself.

Nathan: The real story of the Boston Molasses Flood occurred exactly a century ago in January 1919 when a holding tank ruptured, and a 40-foot wave of molasses traveling at speeds of 45 miles an hour flooded Boston’s North End. The disaster killed 21 people, left 120 injured and destroyed homes, businesses, and buildings. So, why were giant tanks of molasses being stored in an area of high density housing?

Cara: In the 1910s, the North End was a largely immigrant neighborhood. A lot of Italian immigrants lived there. It’s still known as an Italian neighborhood, although I think the demographic makeup has changed at this point, but there are still a lot of Italian restaurants and a lot of Italian history and culture there. So, it was largely poor immigrants at the time. People would also come there to work, because it’s near the harbor so there were a lot of laborers who would come there every day to unload ships. There was a fire station. There was an elevated train that went right through, so it was a really bustling space, and in the middle of all that, this company United States Industrial Alcohol decided to build a giant tank to store molasses.

Cara: So an interesting thing about molasses during that time was that it wasn’t just used as a sweetener, it was used to make alcohol, and then that alcohol was also used to make ammunition. So, there was this huge need for molasses and its products, not only in the United States but in Europe, so there was a huge demand for molasses, and this company decided to build this tank next to the harbor so that molasses could come up from the West Indies and be stored in this tank and then go by train to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there was a distillery. So, it was just sort of a good weigh point and storage point for this huge tank.

Nathan: Tell me about a man named Isaac Gonzales and his attempt to keep the community safe.

Cara: So, Isaac Gonzales as a maintenance man. He worked for United States Industrial Agriculture, and he was really worried about the safety of the tank. It kept him up at night. He would have nightmares, and he would sometimes actually get up in middle of the night over the protestations of his wife and run through the streets to check on the tank to make sure that it was still sound.

Nathan: But despite the misgivings of some of the community, the tanks were left in place until January 15 of 1919.

Cara: On the day itself, I think it was a pretty normal workday. People were working at the harbor, children were playing. A lot of children liked to play around the molasses tank and collect the leftover molasses that had trickled down the sides, and a large shipment had just come in, I think from the West Indies, and been sort of dumped on top of the molasses that was already in there. And so, this chemical reaction occurred where the new molasses was warm from its transit period, and the old molasses was cold because it was winter in Boston and it’s cold. And so, a fermentation process happened more quickly than it would have otherwise, and also the tank was more full than it had ever been. So, some sort of pressure and gas built up, and around noon when a lot of people were taking their lunch break, the tank just explodes.

Nathan: Wow.

Cara: And it sends metal shards flying everywhere, and the molasses itself moves very quickly. I think you mentioned it goes about 35 miles per hour, just really fast, and it just sort of envelops everything around it. People get stuck. It knocked over an elevated railway track. The train driver was really cool under pressure and managed to stop the train before it went plummeting off the track after it broke. Whole teams of horses were trapped, people were screaming. I think the Boston Herald described the scent of blood and molasses permeating the entire area. So, it was really gruesome, and also probably deeply weird to be there and see this sort of nightmarish thing happen.

Nathan: And just putting a human face on this, there was a child, Pasquale Iantosca, who was killed in the flood of that day. What do we know about him?

Cara: There were actually two children that were killed. One was Pascal, one was named Maria. Pascal and Maria both were children who liked to go up to the tank and gather the molasses dripping in pails and take the home to their families, who again didn’t have a lot of money and maybe didn’t have enough money to buy sweetener on their own. And so, they were playing near the tank on that day. Pascal’s dad was actually watching him through the window to make sure that nothing happened to him, but of course he couldn’t have predicted what did happen to him.

Nathan: Wow.

Cara: And yeah, they both died terrible deaths. A lot of bodies were found with broken bones, a lot of people suffocated.

Nathan: So give me a sense of what happened in the aftermath of the disaster. Was anybody ever held responsible?

Cara: Yeah, so that’s a pretty important part of the story. The local people of the North End actually brought a class action suit against the company, United States Industrial Alcohol, that had built the tank and been responsible for its operations. It was a real milestone case. It influenced a lot of the building regulation laws that we have now, and the people won. The company had to pay out restitution to a lot of the victims families and injured people. They had to pay out, I think the modern equivalent of almost $100,000 to each victim’s family, and it was a really long investigation and court case. Tons of witnesses testified, which is really cool now because we have all these deposition documents where we can learn so much about what happened.

Cara: And yeah, a lot of the sort of building regulation laws in place right now come from that. So, the company didn’t actually even need to get a building permit originally to construct the tank.

Nathan: Wow, wow.

Cara: And now of course, now you have to do that, and Steve Puleo says that the tank lawsuit did for building regulations what the Cocoanut Grove Fire, which is another Boston disaster, did for fire standards not even just in the US but across the entire country. It really changed how people thought about where things could go, and what safeguards had to be put in place to make sure that people don’t suffer from accidents like this.

Nathan: As somebody who grew up around Boston and spent a lot of time in Boston, what did you hear about the flood or this event growing up?

Cara: The more you know about it, the more seriously you take it, and the more you can get out of sort of the implications, and the context in which it happened, but when you just hear about it as one sentence, you’re kind of more likely to laugh or think of it as an oddity. And so when I was growing up, it was one of those things that didn’t really seem real, so it … Obviously in school you’re taught about things like the Revolutionary War, you’re taught about Paul Revere, you’re taught about all of the sort of battles that happened in Massachusetts to gain independence, and then you’re taught about other things that happened later in the city’s history. And you’re taught about the Coconut Grove fire and other disasters that sort of helped shape the political and legal landscape, but when you’re taught about the Molasses Flood, it’s kind of … It’s a different category. It’s almost like a fairy tale.

Cara: I never knew that people died in it. I don’t know if I was never told, or I just didn’t think about it, but it was sort of more of like a … Like this sugary disaster, what a strange thing to have happened in our interesting and multifaceted city, and obviously we do have an interesting and multifaceted city, but I just think there’s so much to be had from knowing about this in more detail. And it’s exciting to see people take it more seriously especially now that the hundred-year anniversary has happened, I think it’s gained a larger place in the city’s consciousness.

The Hamlet Fire

On September 3rd, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. The blaze and toxic smoke killed 25 people and injured dozens. Many of the employees tried to escape through the exits, but they were trapped because several of the doors were padlocked from the outside. 28 years later, Hamlet residents and former employees of the plant are still grappling with the painful memories. Producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond travels to Hamlet to learn more.

Music:

Sanctuary by Podington Bear
Respiration by Podington Bear
Memory Wind by Podington Bear
Bespoke by Todd Gauthreaux

Hamlet; Hamlet factory fire; North Carolina; accidents; fire; food; manufacturing; mass production; tragedy

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian: So today on the show, the history of industrial disasters.

Nathan: How they changed the landscape of American capitalism.

Brian: And Erin Brockovich tells us what has changed and what hasn’t since she took on California’s biggest energy company in the 1990s.

Nathan: In September 1991, a fire erupted inside a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Caroline. The flames and toxic smoke killed 25 people and injured dozens. Many of the employees tried to escape through the exits, but they were trapped because several of the doors were padlocked from the outside. Now, 28 years later, Hamlet residents and former employees of the plant are till grappling with the painful memory. Our producer, Charlie Shelton-Ormond, went to Hamlet and spoke with some of the people who were there the day of the fire. Here he is with the story.

Charlie: Annette Peirce Zimmerman has lived in Hamlet her whole life.

Annette: All my life, 53 years.

Charlie: Annette spends a lot of time working for her church. She’s the church secretary, she runs a food pantry there …

Annette: And we’ve been feeding the men at the homeless shelter every fourth Wednesday for past three years.

Charlie: But it isn’t always easy for Annette to stay on the go. She carries with her constant reminders of the tragedy that struck Hamlet nearly three decades ago.

Annette: I have been sick for the past 27, 28 years. My body has gone through numerous aches and pains and changes. Before the fire, I never had a headache. Since the fire, I don’t think I can go a week … I haven’t had a week where I didn’t have a headache. The pain is a constant reminder of what we’ve been through.

Charlie: Annette worked at the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant for three years before a deadly fire erupted inside the facility. During her time there, she says she mostly worked in packing department.

Annette: By the time it reached us, the chicken was already fried frozen, and then typical day I’d go in at seven or eight depending on what orders we had. Go in the packing room, I would weight chicken tenders. I enjoyed my job. I think I enjoyed the people more than the job. If you saw me, you’d always see a lady named Brenda Kelly and Margaret Banks no matter what. They called us the Three Musketeers.

Charlie: Even though she appreciated her community of coworkers, Annette says the conditions in the plant could be tough. Just for example, employees might find themselves working the fry line where it was so hot that even in the middle of winter, you’d be stripped down to very little clothing. But no matter where you were in the plant, it was hard to avoid the smell permeating through the building.

Annette: It smelled raw chicken at times. Until you got used to it, it could be quite unbearable, and walking through the fryer area, that was the hottest part of the building. That area was just, smells of burnt grease mostly. The roof was coming in on one end, so it wasn’t a safe structure at all, but in areas like this when jobs are hard to come by, you have to go to work in unsafe conditions just to feed your family. So the majority of us, we want to work, at least that was my reason for going there. I wanted a job. I wanted to support my children on my own, had two kids at the time. So I wanted to be able to show them that hard work paid off and we could have something of our own.

Charlie: The ability, like Annette says, to have something for your own, like a house or a car, has looked different for people in Hamlet in the past. Before Imperial came to town in 1980, Hamlet was known for one thing: the railroad.

Bryant: Hamlet had been the center of several major rail lines in the South, and it had developed around the railroad station, literally and symbolically, the center of the town was this quite beautiful Victorian train depot. Radiating out from that in a sense were all the things that happened from the railroad.

Charlie: This is historian Bryant Simon. A few year ago, he published a book called The Hamlet Fire. Simon says Hamlet’s success as a railroad town gave its residents a good deal of economic freedom.

Bryant: In Hamlet, officials even bragged that they were the leading center of backyard swimming pools in the South, and the brag was that the railroad had allowed working class men to move into the middle class, and what begins to happen in the late 1950s and kind of slowly into the 1970s, is the railroad industry collapses.

Charlie: Meanwhile, as the railroad industry disappeared in Hamlet, up in Pennsylvania, two men, Emmett Roe and his son Brad were running a chicken processing plant, but things weren’t going great. Their plant was far from their chicken supplier, and they were frustrated by Pennsylvania’s labor regulations.

Bryant: And so, they’re facing their own kind of crisis of profitability, and they begin to look to move. When they begin to look to move, the owner of the company sees an ad for a shuddered ice cream plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, and surely he does what anybody in his position would do, he does a profile of the place. And the things that mattered to him were rates of unemployment, kind of wage rates, really vulnerability, and what he found was maybe the perfect place for a business. A place in which jobs had collapsed, in which primary industries had fallen apart and which there was a surplus of labor. And so what’s important about this system, this system of cheap that’s in place there, is the government, and its lack of involvement is a crucial dynamic here. And in fact, something that the state of North Carolina advertises to potential investor, I mean slyly, they essentially say, look, you can come here and run your plant the way you want to.

Charlie: So once in Hamlet, the Roes were able to operate the Imperial plant with little to no oversight. Simon says Imperial wasn’t the only business that was enticed by this. By 1990, North Carolina was the most industrial state per capita in the country.

Bryant: And so it has a 180,000 work places in 1990, and it has somewhere in the neighborhood of between 35 and 45 factory plant inspectors. So if you break that down, if they did their job and they inspected one factory a day, every day, five days a week, it would have taken them somewhere between 67 and 72 years to inspect every plant in the state.

Charlie: That meant the Roes could violate almost any safety rule and never get caught. So equipment didn’t have to be up to code, and doors could stay padlocked from the outside.

Bryant: The owners, Brad and Emmett Roe, locked the factory doors to stop their employees from stealing chickens. That wasn’t the true story, but it has importance to it. The real story is that the back of the plant where the main door was locked was a place where workers would go out to throw boxes away, and they would go out to maybe get a smoke, but what was happening is, because there was so much traffic out that back door, flies were coming into the factory. And the flies immediately went to the meat, and the officials from the USDA were hounding the Roes in the spring and summer of 1991 about these flies. And one of the maintenance men for the Roes suggested, well, why don’t we just lock the door then no one can go out and the flies can’t come in, and the USDA said, “That’s fine.”

Annette: There was no proof that anyone was stealing chicken, but that was the allegation. Was it worth lives lost to lock those doors over the allegation of some stolen chicken?

Charlie: On September 3, 1991, Annette came into work early. Along with the rest of the workers, she had just enjoyed a day off from Labor Day, and she says, like always, she started work that day with her two good friends Brenda and Margaret.

Annette: We’d always clock in together, and we went in early, and we played around that morning. We pulled each other’s and smocks, and you had these plastic aprons to wear. We kept tearing our aprons. Just playing and talking about our Labor Day weekend, and we usually always worked together, and we got separated that morning. By 8:30, we heard women screaming, and there’s this big, thick partition that separated the frying room from the thigh room. So when I opened it, all you saw was this big, black smoke and women running, and somebody yelled fire, and then the lights started flickering, so we knew it was something serious then. It was too black, you couldn’t see. And then the power went out, and I had fallen. That’s when I got stepped on. I don’t know how long I was on the floor, but I remember making it to the area where the freezer was, where the door that we tried to get out of, and 20, maybe 25 of us ended up in that little area pressed up against the door.

Annette: And a guy, Bernard Campbell, he squeezed through where somebody tore the siding, and he got through the hole to go get somebody with a key. He hurt his back that particular day, but he got out and got the key. I passed out before they opened the door. I remember seeing the door come open ’cause I saw the sunlight, and I remember them telling us to back up because they had to push the door in, but we were pressed up against the door. By the time they got it opened, the first two ladies in the front had died. That was Miss Peggy Anderson was one of those ladies that had died at the front. They said she was smoke inhalation and she had a heart attack from being crushed against all the people pressing against her. And I almost ended up in the freezer with a couple of other people, ’cause that’s what they said, go in the freezer, close the door and you could be able to breathe.

Bryant: A group of workers get to that loading dock, and they realize the doors were locked, and so they scurry into a cooler, thinking that the cooler will protect them from the flames not knowing that what will kill them was carbon monoxide. What they also didn’t know and a kind of brutal irony was that that was one of the doors that actually didn’t close right. It had not been fixed, so it didn’t close tight, so they basically were in this chamber as carbon monoxide seeped into it, and 12 people died in there.

Annette: I came to again. I was outside on the ground beside Miss Cleo Reddick and they were giving me oxygen. I gave her my oxygen mask and got up, and I woke up again, I was in the rescue squad. So, I don’t know how much time had passed between beginning of the fire and the time I got to the hospital. I don’t know.

Charlie: The fire was caused by a hydraulic line that powered a conveyor belt. This belt took battered chicken tenders up a ramp and dumped them into a fryer. But the hydraulic line kept causing problems.

Bryant: The maintenance crew got their early that morning, and they hooked up a new hydraulic line with the wrong parts. They didn’t have the right parts because the owner of the plant, Brad Roe, refused to pay for the right parts.

Charlie: So when the line turned on, a disconnected hose spewed flammable hydraulic fluid. This ignited the flames from the fryer and caused an explosion that cut the factory in half. Twenty-five people died from the flames and toxic smoke that consumed the plant. After the fire, Imperial went bankrupt. Emmett Roe, his son Brad, and plant manager James Hair were indicted on 25 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Emmett Roe pled guilty for all of them, and got an 18 year prison sentence. He only served four and a half.

Charlie: Annette has battled health problems ever since. She’s had multiple surgeries for her neck, knee, and back. She’s been diagnosed with asthma and lung disease from smoke inhalation. She says many of the workers had to go through a long process to receive compensation for their injuries, and some of them even had to pay a portion of that back. In addition to her health, Annette has also dealt with the haunting memory of the fire. A trauma she spent decades coping with.

Annette: It’s much better now than it had been. We had years of therapy, but it’s been my faith and being active in church that has helped more than anything. If I didn’t have church, if I didn’t have God, I know I wouldn’t be here. I’ve had those suicidal moments in regards to that. I felt guilty for years because Brenda and Margaret both died. I felt guilty because we were the Three Musketeers, what happened to one happened to all three of us. All for one, one for all, and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t with them when they died. I don’t know yet. Nobody would ever tell me where they were found at, but I find in comfort in believing that whichever area they died in, they were together.

Charlie: Annette says for years she couldn’t drive past the burned down building, and when she did, she’d often experience anxiety attacks or sit in her car in a trance, mesmerized by the discarded remains. For 10 years, the Imperial plant stayed up in Hamlet as a scar of the tragedy.

Annette: Thinking it was a lack of concern for people and more of a concern for profit. They could have got more profit out of it, I think they would have.

Bryant: The plant was in the Black part of town, and that meant if you went to school, you had to pass the plant. If you went to the Piggly Wiggly, the only supermarket in town, you had to pass the plant. If you went to some churches, you had to pass the plant. If you wanted to go to Main Street, you had to pass the plant. It was a form of terror essentially, and the town wouldn’t take it down because it wouldn’t spend the money to do so. Why? They were hoping that another industrial concern would locate there, because how could the town function without the revenues generated by taxes from that plant?

Charlie: The building stayed hollow and dilapidated until former workers and other community members petitioned city officials to tear it down. Today, a memorial is in place at the old site, which sits right around the corner from Annette’s church.

Annette: Yes, it’s walking distance. Walking … It’s not even a minute drive. Yeah, we can actually go there if you like.

Annette: This, that little path there, that is actually the spot that led to the loading dock where the truck was parked there and the door was locked. This here would have been the break room area.

Charlie: At the memorial park, I also spoke with Willie Baldwin, he was a supervisor at Imperial. We talked about what it took to tear down the building, and how the community and politicians outside of Hamlet had to pressure the city.

Willie: It was a hard fought battle. It was that we had to get outside politicians to come in and to help us get this torn down, because it was an eyesore. And then on top of that, it was infested with all type of diseases, and I had kids walking through here. And we don’t see our kids all the time when they leave the house, ’cause some of them could have come up here and got messed up and we never knew nothing about it.

Charlie: Both Annette and Willie say city officials have always been reluctant to address the tragedy, even today, they’re still waiting on an official dedication for the memorial from the city.

Annette: It’s never going to happen.

Willie: It ain’t gonna happen until we start pushing.

Annette: But we shouldn’t have to push for that. Whenever the building was torn down, they said they’d do a memorial park. They said we will officially dedicate it when the trees grew. Trees are grown, and they said, when the trees bloom. They have bloomed a few times.

Willie: Yep.

Annette: But we still have no official dedication.

Charlie: A little bit down the road from the old Imperial site lies another memorial, one the workers put up shortly after the fire. It includes a stone monument with the names of those who died, and a poem written by Annette.

Annette: Silver and gold have we none, just love overflowing for everyone. Once you were here, now you are gone with tears, joy and sorrow, your loving memory lingers on.

Charlie: Bryant Simon says there are eerie similarities between the Hamlet fire and the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City 80 years prior. That fire killed close to 150 people, and like Hamlet, many of the workers couldn’t escape because the doors to the stairs and exits were locked. The Triangle Fire brought national attention to dangerous sweatshop conditions, which led to stricter labor laws and more federal regulations. And Simon says that’s where Triangle and Imperial start to look different.

Bryant: Triangle created a kind of fundamental rethinking of the role of government, and in the wake of Hamlet, that didn’t happen, and again, I think that’s the way in which this system of cheap creates a logic that is hard to get out of. What’s the answer to cheap? It’s not more government, it’s more industry that will create more jobs, and that essentially was the state of North Carolina’s response, and if anything, it’s become increasingly the response of other states around the country. As we have this sort of fiction of state lines, right, in this country that forces competition for dwindling opportunities. In a sense, we’ve redefined the function of government not into protecting people but into being some sort of engine for job creation. With just don’t care about what the jobs are, what the costs are on the backend, and there’s nobody really. I don’t know who’s out there who’s really challenging that kind of broader logic.

Annette: I want to know if it was worth it. That would be my question to them. If the 25 lives lost that day and those that have died from their injuries since then, what was it worth it? Was it worth the profit that they made from the business that they ran, and to run it the way they did, and if they could do something different, would they have? Would that have actually changed them? Was it worth locking the doors?

Nathan: That was producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond with the story. Special thanks to Annette Pierce Zimmerman, Willie Baldwin, and Bryant Simon. Simon’s book is The Hamlet Fire, a Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives.

Cork Goes to War

Before the age of plastics, cork was king in the American manufacturing industry. Author David Taylor sits down with Brian to bring us a story about how a fire at the Crown Cork and Seal factory raised suspicions of Nazi Sabotage and threatened national security on the eve of World War II.

Music:

Lode Runner by Podington Bear

Nazis; factory workers; fire; manufacturing; national security

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian: Come with me to Baltimore on the eve of World War II when American national security was threatened by a factory fire, Nazi sabotage, and cork. You heard it, cork.

David: For much of the first half of the 20th century, before there was widespread plastic use.

Brian: That’s author David Taylor.

David: Cork in granulated form was used to seal and to insulate and to buffer things in industry. So whether it was in gaskets in car engines or to glaze windshields, there were many industrial uses for cork that we don’t think of today.

Brian: Found in countless consumer products, cork was a hidden necessity in everyday life. So imagine the alarm when an entire harvest of cork caught fire at the Crown Cork and Seal on September 17, 1940.

David: This was over a year before the US entered World War II, but there was already an atmosphere of paranoia and the fear of Nazi sabotage and activity on the East Coast, and so …

Brian: Because of course the war was flaring in Europe.

David: It was flaring in Europe and Germany was trying to keep the US out, and so it was basically using fear tactics to do that. And so there was ports and factories were on high alert, and then in this September late afternoon, suddenly the cork in the cork yard at Crown Cork and Seal burst into flame, and it was a tremendous fire covering like nine acres of cork in two nights of fire. It drew 400 firefighters. You could see the fire from as far away as Philadelphia some said.

Brian: Wow.

David: Yeah. It was the biggest fire in Baltimore of that century at that point. And so, it was just a spectacular in and of itself. And then the fact that it was that late in the fall, after the harvest of cork, it made it … It was that much bigger, and that much kind of more devastating because it wiped out basically a year’s supply of the cork.

Brian: At the time, the United States was the world’s leading importer of cork all of which came from European forests, and with Germany blockading the Atlantic, America’s cork supply was in serious peril.

David: That fire with its spectacle and the timing alerted the national security machinery basically to say, this is a potential vulnerability that we have. The foreign Commerce Department looked at what the flows of cork was and how cork was used in the defense industry and that we were ramping our role as the arsenal of democracy, and so the manufacturing was key, and it was at that September 1940. After that you see that cork goes under allotment the way that rubber goes in.

Brian: And is that because so much was wiped out in this one fire or because as a result of the fire, they said, wait a second, we better really start allocating this.

David: I think it was more the latter that it was the attention that it drew to this fact that we were completely reliant on a foreign supply of this natural product.

Brian: Almost immediately after the fire, rumors of sabotage began to circulate, and they weren’t entirely unfounded. Glaring questions emerged about the timing of the fire, which erupted after a new shipment of cork had just arrived, and multiple stories of Nazi spy activity on the East Coast made headline news.

David: The FBI at that point of the fire had already been tracking a real Nazi spy ring based in Long Island. A man named Fritz Duquesne had started it, but he did have plans for infrastructure bombing and disruption, and so when their ring was actually arrested a few months later after the fire, it just validated public concerns that there were these hidden forces at play.

Brian: Taking these suspicions into account, the FBI launched a secret investigation into the origins of the fire. Agents descended on Baltimore to collect any information related to the incident, but in the end, the investigation found no evidence of foul play.

David: One of the articles later during the time took a look at these, a bunch of these factory fire and explosion instances, and saying at that point, fire forensics was so early that a fire would destroy the evidence of its origins.

Brian: Sure.

David: And so it’s not surprising there was no conclusive finding at the time. For me, it’s a less critical about whether or not it was deliberately started, but what’s interesting is how the response pushed this company and the whole sector into the limelight of national security.

Brian: A few months before America entered World War II, the government declared cork a critical material for national security. And someone in the cork industry mounted a campaign to plant cork trees on US soil in an effort to reduce the country’s dependence on the European supply of cork.

David: Crown Cork and Seal’s owner, Charles McManus Sr., said well maybe we can grow our way out of this crisis, and grow our way out of this vulnerability, and he worked with agronomists and arborists to say what zones can we grow cork in? And he developed a public campaign working with state governors and state forest agencies and 4H clubs.

Brian: So I have Arizona in mind.

David: Yes.

Brian: Is that where it was?

David: Well, it was the whole arc across the South from Maryland to Louisiana to, yes, Arizona and California. The whole sweep of the country that way growing cork.

Brian: And did that every get put into production or does it take longer than that?

David: It’s interesting. That’s what intrigued me to read about this campaign. It’s such a longterm investment. It would take 20 years before you could harvest from the trees, but it was for morale and for potentially other reasons, it was worthwhile doing, and so you had millions of cork oak seedlings planted and you had people checking out the quality of cork, practicing harvesting, trying to get that practice going in case it caught on for the industry.

Brian: David says some of those cork trees are still part of the landscape today. The living monuments to the devastating fire that erupted at the Crown Cork and Seal factory in September 1940.

David: I’ve also heard from people in the Carolinas that say, yes, in fact my father, a farmer, was really intrigued by this campaign, and so we planted cork, and they’re still alive and still growing. So there are some in the landscape. I think in many places they’re sort of incognito, ’cause people don’t know where they came from originally, but if you see a 70 or 80 year old tree, and it looks like its bark is sort of woolied and spongy feeling, check it out, it could be a cork tree.

Brian: David Taylor is a freelance writer and the author of many books, including Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II.

David takes Goliath

In 2000, Erin Brockovich became a household name. That was the year a movie about Brockovich’s fight against California energy giant Pacific Gas & Electric was released to critical acclaim. Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her portrayal of Brockovich, a tenacious law clerk who helped spur a historic settlement against PG&E for contaminating the groundwater around its gas compressor stations in Hinkley, California.

Since then, Erin has continued her efforts to hold major corporations accountable after industrial disasters. She spoke to Brian about how her activism started, what changed after the settlement with PG&E and why the lessons of history are never truly learned.

California; activism; corporations; disaster; energy production

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Brian: One of the most successful films of the 2001 Academy Awards was Erin Brockovich, which brought the story of the fight against corporate negligence and water contamination in California to a worldwide audience. Julie Roberts picked up the Oscar, but the real star was the environmental activist who campaigned against energy giant Pacific Gas and Electric.

Erin: I do remember sitting with Ed in his law library.

Brian: That’s Erin Brockovich, the real Erin Brockovich. The Ed she’s talking about was Ed Masry, her friend, boss, and partner in the landmark lawsuit.

Erin: We get put in a box. I’ve always been trying to break out of that box, because I’m a dyslexic, and Ed when we first began by law was put in a box, and he said, “You know, kid, we’re not going to be able to do this because of a statute of limitations.” And for me, I couldn’t accept that. I said, “Ed, you’ve got to be kidding me that you’re … So what, we’re just going to give up? That you would even say that to me as I’m sitting here in your law library. Let’s look at the all the law books in here. How did these laws happen? Because somebody made a challenge. Somebody went out on a limb to fight for a law, to change a law, create a law. You’re not going to do that, ’cause that’s what I thought lawyers do.” And he went, Ed and I had that kind of relationship, and that was competitive, and he was like, “No, yeah, you’re absolutely right.”

Brian: I got the chance to talk recently with Erin. We chatted about what it’s like trying to hold major corporations accountable, why seeing is believing, and the Post-It notes that help keep Erin motivated day in and day out.

Brian: Welcome to Backstory, Erin.

Erin: Hi Brian.

Brian: You grew up in Kansas, and I’m curious to know what your relationship to the environment was in Kansas when you were growing up.

Erin: Well, I’m so glad you bought that conversation up. I was born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and I’m mixture of both my mom and my dad. My dad was an engineer, and my mom was a journalist, so I guess my snoopy behavior comes from my mom’s side, but my dad actually was an industry man, retired from the United States government, but most of his career ran the pipelines from Texaco.

Brian: Wow.

Erin: And he’s the very one that taught me at a very young age the value of water and land and our correlation and our health to it and the importance of protecting it. So, when I got involved in Hinkley, so much of that developed for me. It was a natural fit.

Brian: I want you to take us back to the moment where you began to suspect that something was unfolding. Take us back to the moment where you were going through these real estate records and discovered something untoward.

Erin: It’s been what? Well, I guess we’re coming up on the 20-year anniversary of the film Erin Brockovich, and it’s really taken me all that time to kind of look back and put together what I was doing. When I first saw the records, I was a single mom, I needed a job. I wanted to do a good job, and when the box came to me, and Ed said, “You know how to open this file?” To be honest with you, I actually didn’t but I wasn’t going to tell him that, and I began to look at the documents. Isn’t that a funny thing? Actually pick something up and read it? There was bar graphs in there from the lab work.

Erin: So the lab work of the kids was done on a chart so you could clearly see the white count, the blood count, the T-cells, all of that listed off on the left, and then a graph of where it should be so I could clearly see, wow, wow, these are way off the chart. And as a single mom and adoring my children, I was like, I just think that’s odd. If this were me, I’d be asking, why is my child’s hemoglobin so high? Or why is my white count so low? I can clearly see coming from a lab that this isn’t right.

Brian: And can you give us a little context about the file in general? As I understand it, it was primarily real estate records.

Erin: It was, but the medical records were in the real estate file.

Brian: Why?

Erin: ‘Cause Roberta Walker had been saving them, because she didn’t trust what was going on. So she was throwing everything, but what was happening was they were trying to settle a real estate transaction deal and sell the house.

Brian: Right.

Erin: So all the medical records just happened to be in there, and that’s what struck my attention. Was like, oh, what are these medical files doing in here and why are these kids have this strange blood work? In a real estate file?

Brian: Good questions, so what did you end up concluding? What did you decide PG&E was up to?

Erin: Well, I thought it was very strange, so I asked Ed if I could go out to Hinkley and meet Roberta. She was my first contact, and she was the mother that was out there that had reached out to the firm that PG&E was trying to buy her property. So, when I went in and I was talking to Roberta, she brought out the files, and we talked a lot about the animals covered in tumors. These were just weird bizarre stories, and I’m listening with great curiosity. And she brought out again her real estate files. She had copies of everything, ’cause PG&E wanted to buy her house, and it really started off with they weren’t paying the right dollar figure, and they wanted to buy other homes, so they kind of started having these community fairs that PG&E put on.

Brian: Why did they say they wanted to buy the houses? They were getting into the real estate business all of a sudden?

Erin: No, the were bringing in a new road, and they had to buy it. It was really kind of just a big old lie.

Brian: Is that what they said?

Erin: Yeah, that’s what they were telling people.

Brian: Uh-hmm (affirmative).

Erin: So on one of the reports there was a Dr. Anderson, I remember his name, had written down the word CR6. I thought that was weird, and Roberta talked to him about it, and he had told her it was hexavalent chromium. So, there was some records, and I asked Roberta if she’d been out to the water board, and she said she had but there wasn’t anything. So that was my first introduction to going out to the water board, and it was, as I was digging into them, and you’ll see in the film, I went out there and to get in, I started to get reports and was reading stuff that was fascinating me. They knew they had a plume. It had gone a good distance, but there was the word: hexavalent chromium.

Erin: So again, something that started to resinate with me, I’m like what are they hiding? And this is a chemical, what is this chemical? And again, my curiosity started asking questions, talking to experts, making phone calls, and learning the danger of it. And then it kind of started to snowball from there. Roberta would tell me about her family’s illnesses. She would tell me about the neighbor who had a dairy farm and all the cows were covered in tumors, and I literally could go over there and see them. Roberta would tell me, here was her swimming pool, and the water was green. And every frog that got in there, they were dead. I used to collect them out of her pool, and to be standing there and looking at two headed frogs, green water, cattle covered with tumors, trees dying, hearing these women’s story, and thinking to myself in Kansas.]

Erin: It was like, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore, ’cause I don’t see this in Kansas, and I remember somebody from PG&E standing there with me, and I cannot remember their name, and it wasn’t a high official, but their like, “Well, you’re not a doctor or scientist, why would you … This is normal.” And I’m like, “Okay. I’m going to tell you something right now as an outsider. Two-headed frogs and green water is not the standard. It’s just not.” And everything began to happen from there.

Brian: Well, you’re going up against one of the largest utilities certain in the world, PG&E. How did it feel to be going up against that kind of gargantuan opponent?

Erin: I don’t even know that I made that association. I was very rooted in with the curiosity, uncovering what was going on. Somebody was telling a lie somewhere. People were sick, animals were dying, and none of it made sense. So, I was going to keep going, and I believe Ed and the lawyers on that side realized who this was, and that they were going to legally give them a run for their money. And I spent a year out there before anything was even filed, gathering all the information and evidence and meeting people. We quickly realized that they had been poisoned, but proving that was going to be a legal challenge.

Erin: One of the first documents that I got into in a paragraph told me the whole story, and when you get into court, you’ve got these dose response ratios, and it’s important that people understand if you have a contamination in your water, it didn’t just show up. You’re looking at a contamination and a lower level of a larger number in time.

Brian: Right.

Erin: And so when I was out in Hinkley, we knew the levels were still high. But I was fascinated with one of the first documents that I read, and it stated that … The report was dated 1992. Pacific, Gas and Electric’s monitoring wells in Hinkley were still registering five PPM. Now I’d already learned that five PPM was declared hazardous waste, and it went onto say that 90% of the chromate had already been removed via domestic and agricultural use, and I’m like, oh. It was ’92, and it’s five PPM and 90%’s been removed, oh my gosh, what was it in the 80s? What was it in the 70s, as time went on.

Erin: And we finally found those documents, and there was subpoena requests and everything, ’cause it just wasn’t sitting around. The first indication of the levels hitting that plume was about 1960, and they were over 20 PPM, ding, ding, ding, that explains so much, and so you have to be able to prove that in a court of law. So for me, really digging for the records became really critical, and getting involved with the employees then. They had been poisoned too. It took a very long time for them to trust me, and that this is something that’s important that is often times missing is establishing that trust.

Brian: How did you do that?

Erin: Coming back, coming back, coming back every single day, taking the phone call, bringing them information, having a conversation.

Brian: To what extent were they worried in a very understandable way that they would lose their jobs?

Erin: The employees?

Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Erin: It took them awhile, but once they realized, and they started coming to community meetings. So when they start seeing these documents, and the employees the connection they started to make was, is this why my child is sick? So, there was two employees, and both have now passed, Lily [Melindas 00:50:51] and Chuck [Ebersole 00:50:53], that really came forward. And one way in how they missed it, the hexavalent chromium that was coming into the facility was named Bets 45. So nobody would make the association that Bets 45 was in fact hexavalent chromium, so as they would hear me or they’d be able to see a document, they’d go back, and then they started looking up Bets 45 and found out it was hexavalent chromium. Then they’d call and tell me.

Erin: So, it took a while of just showing up, being there, bringing information, and it was hard for the employees to accept. To have someone that’s a stranger come in and say, “Oh by the way, this person has been hiding information from you and poisoning you and your children for 10 years.” That’s kind of really hard to wrap your mind around. You don’t want to believe that, right?

Brian: Sure.

Erin: And neither did they.

Brian: You’ve mentioned the film, Oscar-winning film, what do you think that film has done to change perceptions of corporate responsibility?

Erin: What I do believe happened is that the film woke people up. It gave us a platform where they woke up, and they could see a human experience that they could relate to. When the film first came out, I was shocked. We couldn’t get into every theater we went to. It was sold out, and so the next day I went, and even in the middle of the day the theater was packed. And I sat in the back of the room, and no one knew who I was, and I listened and I watched their reactions. But on the way out, I was listening to the comments, and they’re like, “Oh, I wonder if that’s just in Hinkley. I wonder how our water is.” They were asking questions, and so it was that platform that I think helped inspire people, empower people, and I really hope that they realized you don’t have to fit this idea or standard of if you don’t have this degree as a doctor or lawyer or scientist, therefore you couldn’t say anything. I think that was a real shakeup moment.

Brian: Right.

Erin: To see an everyday person, unsuspecting, who, a lot of times we all feel that way about ourselves, could actually rise up and push back, and I was so intrigued with what the responses were, and it’s been over this time. Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how many more Hinkleys we’ve been involved in that continue to go on. I continue to scratch my head. All the issues we’re facing today. It’s like what have we not learned? And I do see a pivotal moment right now where that shift is going to happen, where we are looking at … We could talk about glysophates, you know Roundups, a plethora of other chemicals.

Erin: We could talk about what happened in Flint, Michigan, and lead, and the outbreak of that across this country. Most people don’t know, we’ve got two hundred other sites of lead contamination with levels in some locations higher than Flint. How could that be? I began my work in Hinkley in 1991, that case settled in 1997. I had another case with PG&E, same exact thing, that settled in 2005, and here it is 2019, and it still goes on everywhere, every day.

Brian: You’ve said we’re at a turning point, yet politically I think most objective observers would argue that regulation is being hollowed out in the national government.

Erin: Well, and it is, and because it is, guess what? Everyone is afraid of disruption. I’m not, because it gets us up off the couch. It gets us involved. We poke our heads over there, and we’re like going, wait a minute, why are you rolling back those regulations? I don’t think that’s a good idea, or I know this much. So, the movement is I don’t know if we get comfortable or complacent or we assume that these issues regarding water, lead in water, chromium six, is just being taken care of, or we assume that because of the film Erin Brockovich and there was a big payday that was uncovered and all is good. Oh, that’s not true at all. We’re still out in Hinkley, California. PG&E lied about it again. The entire town is gone again. They bought everything, and so because there’s disruption, there’s a movement happening.

Brian: You’ve mentioned the failure to learn some of the lessons of Hinkley. Since the settlement of the Hinkley case, there have been oil spills, there have been charges that earthquakes relating to fracking have spread around the country. There’s obviously Flint, Michigan. I know you’re not a historian, but help me who is a historian understand why people fail to learn lessons from history.

Erin: Fear. Fear if they speak up. I think of all the employees. They’re going to lose their job. The word whistleblower has such a bad name, and it shouldn’t be, but we’re bullied. We’re told if you say this, you’re going to lose your job. That strikes fear at the heart of everyone. I don’t want to lose my job. Oh my gosh, I want to send my kid to college, how would I pay my mortgage? And it’s terrifying, because we’re working because we want to have a home. We want to feed our children, we want to send them to college. We want to pay for our insurance, and so if somebody pushes on you, and bullies you, I think it’s a really big deal. We become fearful, and if we’re fearful, we shut up.

Erin: When I work with communities, and I’ve seen this often. I ask them, ’cause they’re not going to talk about it, because see they don’t want … We judge, and I remember this feeling as a dyslexic. Just because you say something, you’re different, my mom always taught me, just because you’re different or you say something that isn’t necessarily scientifically or what other astute, wise, doesn’t mean you’re inferior, and I think that we feel that way. So I ask community’s to close their eyes, and I ask them, you’ve been in this community, and we understand we are looking at a chemical in your water, and we’re not going to have the conversation. You don’t want to have the conversation because you’re fearful that you’ll be teased or seen different or the community’s going to collapse, because the company’s going to go away, but I need to know about your health. How any of you have an illness or a disease? And I could have a room of 900 community members, and I tell them to keep your eyes closed but raise your hand.

Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Erin: And 80 to 90%’s room’s hands are up, and I say, keep your hands up, open your eyes and take a look around. And that becomes the breakthrough moment. They’re like, oh, I’m not alone. I can say something. I’m not going to be told that I’m silly or crazy or this isn’t related to this or that, and that becomes the shift when they realize that they’re not alone. So I think out of fear of being isolated or name called or judged, labeled, perceived, whatever, they step away.

Brian: We’ve spent a good period of time just now talking about destruction, deception, disease, yet you strike me as an extraordinarily optimistic and even hopeful person. How do you keep feeling hopeful?

Erin: Well, it’s funny you … Now you know why nobody invites me to parties. People, because see you ask me a question, and I’m going to give you an answer, and people everywhere I go will ask me a question about water, and it turns into one of these conversations, and they’re like, oh my gosh, what a downer, don’t bring her again. It is daunting. By nature, I’m optimistic. I’ve just learned, again probably from my upbringing. When … If I hear a negative, I find a positive. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, keep on going, and so …

Erin: And I use Post-Its, and I use positive notes and affirmations, and when I go south, I want to go north. And I put them on my car. I just constantly, because I feel the negativity in myself, and it’s daunting and it’s draining, and so if I can shift it … I will tell you I felt, I don’t know, five years ago, that deep, this is overwhelming and daunting and negative, and oh my gosh. I never want to be one to give up, but my first grandchild was born, and it completely just reinvigorated me about what I will continue to do and the legacy I’ll leave for a future for them.

Brian: Erin, what is the best Post-It in your car right now?

Erin: It goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and that’s never to get your dobber down it comes from my mom and my dad, and so-

Brian: Would you like to explain to our listening audience what a dobber is?

Erin: Your mood, your mindset, dobber, just don’t get your dobber down.

Brian: That’s environmental advocate and consumer activist Erin Brockovich.

Nathan: So Brian, one of the things about the Erin Brockovich interview that just jumped out immediately was this question of fear and fear among people who don’t exactly know what their recourse is, whether or not they even have leverage over their employer, and that question of industrial accidents being one thing that makes it hard for people to raise a stink at their workplace. I think in some ways opens a conversation about workplace safety and security more generally. There’s industrial accidents, but there’s also post-industrial accidents and problems in workplaces that I’m sure many workers today feel almost no inclination at all to raise hay about.

Brian: Yeah, I think they know that they could easily be fired or certainly ostracized for bringing this up. It should be said that we do have some protections for “whistleblowers” that probably didn’t exist 50 years ago, and certainly didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Nonetheless, it’s human nature to not really trust those mechanisms, and it’s definitely human nature to worry about the woman working next to you and what she’s going to do for a job if the plant closes down. Between the threat of safety issues and companies just moving overseas because they can get cheaper labor combined with a collapse of union membership, workers are not in a very strong position these days, wouldn’t you agree?

Nathan: I would. I would agree. There has been no shortage of important commentary about the demise of labor unions or the weakening of organized labor, and what that has meant for any number of aspects of the middle class or worker representation and voice in politics or what have you. But I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that there are certain aspects of work that have become safer over time. You think about industrial work in the 1890s contrasted with that from the mid-20th century or certainly the later 20th century, and there’s been some marked differences. I mean child labor, for example, is something that is at least not legal anymore as it was in the 1890s, or if you think about the fact that in 1947 for example, some 16,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and contrast that with a 2017 number that has just over 5000 killed on the job. Now, obviously 5000 is a lot of people, but to have less than a third of what it was even 70 years ago has to be taken as some form of progress.

Brian: Yeah, and there’s a time element here, and I don’t just mean 2017 versus much earlier period, I’m talking about what is a casualty having to do with work?

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian: Today, we are much more sophisticated about understanding the longterm implications of work, whether it’s black lung disease, whether it’s asbestos poisoning, whether it’s exposure to radiation, the job, and I’m guessing in those statistics you rattled off were not including people who die 20 year later or 30 years later.

Nathan: And the other thing I would say too is we are in a moment, sadly, where I don’t think people have it on their, the front of their mind or their consciousness even understand themselves as workers. There were dramatic shifts in the late 20th century where Americans really did begin to see themselves as consumers first even as investors or entrepreneurs, right, the arrival of the mutual fund in the 1980s versus the workplace pension. So all of this I think has changed the conversation to a degree where you have something, like say the Hamlet Fire, that Bryant Simon talks about in 1991. The conditions leading up to that event are deplorable to a profound degree, and yet there’s no public outcry or debate around that. Even today, you have workers in chicken processing plants who are literally wearing diapers on the assembly line because of the restrictions on bathroom breaks, right.

Brian: Wow.

Nathan: So the creation of jobs doesn’t necessarily ensure the quality of those jobs, right. So this is I think another point that we have to think through in terms of how we as a society think about industrial accidents, post-industrial work, the kinds of recourse that people are allowed, and the day-to-day indignities that as you remark, almost go unnoticed in the general statistical treatment of workplace safety.

Brian: And what struck in the piece about the Hamlet Fire is what Bryant Simon calls “the economy of cheap.”

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian: And part of that political economy is cheap government, if you will, or hollowing out government, the absence of regulation. And by the way, one of the reason the state of North Carolina would offer for having a, let’s call it a minimal regulatory infrastructure is that if they over regulate, these companies are just gonna go to another state.

Nathan: Right.

Brian: In the 19th century, this kind of competition between states to attract business was called the race to the bottom. There were a lot of good thing about federalism, but one of its weak points in my opinion is creating these kinds of competitions between states where how can we bend over backwards even more to attract business but not regulate that business?

Nathan: And that of course, the companies have the option if they’re capitalized enough to take their business outside of the borders of the US completely. They can go to a maquiladora, which is one of these kind of low budget manufacturing places in Mexico, or then of course take it to Southeast Asia. Even many of their raw materials are coming from corners of the world that are very poorly regulated and observed, and so there’s always, like you say, this kind of race that is not just from state to state, but a race to the bottom that is absolutely international.

Brian: It’s a great point, Nathan, and you know a lot of people today are comparing the era we live in to the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. Most of the people making that comparisons are talking about income inequality, but another element that I think really is similar is corporate entities out growing the scope of the government agencies regulating them.

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian: In the 19th century, those agencies were local, and sometimes state, and the Gilded Age is when you have the emergence of giant national, sometimes multinational corporations. The solution? We nationalized a lot of that regulation during the progressive era, during the beginning of the 20th century. The modern day equivalent of nationalizing regulation more than 100 years ago would be these kinds of rules and regulations that were build into NAFTA, for instance, or built into GAT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, that aren’t just about, well, free trade or prohibiting tariffs. They’re also about workplace regulations. They’re also about the amount of environmental protection that multi nationally corporations need to abide by.

Nathan: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger. Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

Announcer 2: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Announcer 3: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor at history at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.