The story arc and the lives of our characters in Swirled All the Way to the Shrubare forcefully impacted by industrialists. Indirectly–we don’t (yet) actually meet any bona fide robber barons in the work. Their circle of influence effects everyone, though.
Industrialists often accumulate great wealth in the course of creating products and services at scale. In most cases, once wealth accumulation becomes significant for an individual or family, a curious thing happens.
They can’t stop.
Not only do industrialists generally want More, capital ‘M;’ once they have it, they want more More and so on in an upwards spiral that knows no ceiling.
Probably this has to do with our evolutionary past, in which our ancestors never knew if they’d eat tomorrow or not. In a world of scarcity, it makes sense to grab hold of as much food, water, resources or money as possible once the opportunity presents itself.
With every great accumulation of wealth is a funnel-shaped flow of resources in one direction, and inevitably as a consequence, resources are diverted away from somewhere, and someone, else. Or: the many tend to pay a price when the few accumulate great wealth. One of the classic Gilded Age cartoons offers insight:
Here are two brief examples of the effects the activities of industrialists can have on regular people. The first is a quote from Dr. Alice Hamilton’s memoir, Exploring the Dangerous Trades:
“April, 1911. Today I went over to the West Penn Hospital to look through the records. It is an indescribably dingy place, smoke-begrimed and ugly. One of the great Carnegie Steel Mills is just below it and as I sat by the window I could watch the ambulances crawl up the hill to the accident entrance with a new victim inside. Three came while I was there. So many cases are sent from the mills that evidently the clerk got tired writing the name of the Company and had a rubber stamp made which, appropriately enough, he uses with red ink. All down the page came these red blotches, just like drops of blood. Andrew Carnegie himself is here today, making a speech out at the Institute. I went there Saturday afternoon and I saw the John Alexander murals of the steel mills, lovely pictures of clean, athletic youths, engaged in healthy sport against a background of Spotless Town. I suppose he was never allowed to look at the real thing. Did you know that the steel men still work twelve hours a day and seven days in the week? And that one of the fiercest defenders of the system is the minister of the most important Presbyterian church? It makes me ashamed to be a Presbyterian. There are queer contrasts in life, aren’t there? Sunday evening I was invited to the H——’s for supper. They are in steel and very wealthy, and I was all hot inside over the luxury of the house and the complacence of Mrs. H. And then their daughter came in. She has just returned from a year at school in Italy and she is the most exquisite young thing I have ever seen, beautiful, gentle, cultivated, modest. She is the product of this ill-gotten wealth; I suppose she couldn’t be so exquisite had she not had it.”
This second excerpt is from our story. While it’s fiction, we do capture accurately the medical effects of lead poisoning on a human being. Lead toxicity was Dr. Hamilton’s particular specialty in the field of Industrial Hygiene.
The scene is in The Shrub. Our man Pinky is interviewing Horacek, a bathtub enameler who suffers from severe lead poisoning at this point.
Horacek was emaciated—no fat, no muscle. The cloth of his shirt, pants and coat was marred with soot and the occasional fleck of dried mud, yet oddly, his shoes were freshly shined. Those shoes had deep scuffs, but old Horacek had taken great pains to mask them.
“Hungry?”
The man brushed back wisps of hair from his face. His hair—what remained of it—was so gossamer thin that it didn’t seem able to land anywhere. The absurd phrase dirigible hair rose unbidden into Pinky’s consciousness; he found it unnecessarily funny. Horacek looked down at his concave stomach, then back up at Pinky. As he rotated his head up and down Pinky watched the gray skin wrinkle and un-wrinkle. It was ugly, but it was compelling too.
“I could try to eat.”
What an odd way to put it. Very well then. “McNeal!”
Pinky had skipped breakfast and its cost; he hadn’t eaten since the night before. He ordered a Reuben and had to make do when half the ingredients of his second favorite sandwich weren’t available. Heaps of blessings on McNeal, though—the man always did his best. If corned beef wasn’t in the house, some other species of beef would be. If there was no Russian dressing to be found, well then dang it, McNeal would scrounge up French or some other European dressing-nationality. Like his idol Harry Johnson, the man believed “It is of the utmost importance to see that everything you furnish is properly served, and is clean and fit to eat.”
“Mr. Horacek?”
“Yes?”
“What do you want to eat?”
McNeal stood there, silent and still, waiting. Horacek stared into the middle distance. Strands of dirigible-hair sailed aloft.
“I’m not very hungry.”
Not very hungry? Mercy. The man was practically a skeleton.
“Perhaps a banana. Yes, I’ll have a banana. No corn! Corn is hard on the digestion, you know. Corn is a tough one, she is.”
Pinky leaned back, let out a long breath. McNeal made no outward sign of reaction to the man’s odd menu choice.
“Very well, sir. A banana, hold the corn. And to drink, sir?”
“Yes, Horacek, old fella. Would you like something to drink? It’s no problem here, you’re among friends, if you know what I mean. Beer? Whisky? Gin, perhaps, or maybe you’ll go for brandy, like I do? On the rare occasions when I have a nip, that is.”
McNeal’s eyebrows flew up at that. Horacek’s hunkered down. “Oh, no, sirs, no spirits for me. The digestion, you see. It’s all bad for the digestion.”
“Perhaps some tea then, sir? Or water?” Laws! How was McNeal so damned unflappable!
“Water. Just water.”
“Very well, sir.”
When McNeal headed for the bar, Pinky tried to make conversation. “Funny about you ordering that banana! You know, my friend Unctual …”
But then he stopped. This line of thought looked likely to go nowhere. Down to business, then. Pinky drew his pencil, squared his small sheaf of paper and got ready to take notes.
“So. Let’s start our interview. Age?”
Eyes gradually traversed back to questioner. “Thirty-one.”
“Thirty … what?”
For the first time, the man’s eyes opened fully. “I know. I look a lot older, don’t I?”
I thought you were sixty-five, thought Pinky. No point in disclosing a precise number to the poor guy, though.
“Well, I thought you were a little older, that’s all.”
“It’s the lead. They say it ain’t, but we all know it is.”
“Oh? How?”
The man smiled—a ghastly affair for several reasons. For one, it looked forced, artificial—painful, even. But for another, this was the first time Pinky had ever seen a “lead line.” Dr. Hamilton had told him to look out for these. She had informed him that a lead line was a deposit of black lead sulfide in the cells of the mouth, usually most obvious on the gums along the margin of the front teeth.
Gawd, it was awful to gaze upon. Black, instead of pink! Dog gums, is what it looked like.
Horacek was not an isolated case. The industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the fields of mining, steel, lead industries, radium, textiles and all the other “Dangerous Trades” were quite ok with using up human material in the work, tossing spent workers aside and then hiring new ones.Untold millions of human beings were harmed by largely preventable side effects of industrial processes. We will examine some specific examples in a later post.
Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to United Fruit yet. Rather than duplicate my efforts, I’ll link to the main Shrub website here:
http://http://www.swirledshrub.com/united-fruit//united-fruit/
Next Episode: a few characteristics of the industrialist, examined.