Writing Deindustrialisation
September 19, 2014 § 3 Comments
I’m always surprised by how deindustrialisation and the economic and social dislocation it caused in the northern United States and Canada gets written about. Take, for example, an otherwise interesting and informative article in The Boston Globe last weekend. In an article about Sahro Hussan, a young Somali-American, and Muslim, woman who has created a business of avant-garde fashions for Muslim women, in Lewiston, ME, Linda Matchan, The Globe‘s reporter, writes:
Lewiston was one of the largest textile producers in New England, rolling out millions of yards in cotton fabrics every year. In time, though, the industry struggled to compete with Southern states where production costs were lower. Lewiston went into decline.
While there is nothing factually wrong with Matchan’s description of what happened in Lewiston (or any other industrial town across the northern portion of North America), note how any responsibility for what happened is removed from the equation. Matchan makes it sound like this was just an entirely natural process.
Deindustrialisation wasn’t a natural process, it didn’t just happen. The reason why the mills in Lewiston (or Lowell, Laurence, Lynn, or anywhere else) struggled wasn’t some random event. It happened because the corporations that owned those mills decided that they were not producing enough value for share-owners. So these corporations pulled out of places like Lewiston and moved down South. Why? Because production costs were too great in the North, the workers made too much (they were often unionised), and there was too much regulation of the workplace for the corporations’ preferences. So, they were induced to pull out and move down South where workplace regulation was minimal, where workers weren’t unionised, and the corporations could make great profits. The governments down South actively worked with these corporations to bring them South, mostly through these unregulated workplaces and tax incentives. As a friend of mine notes, this is how the South won the Civil War. But the South’s victory was shortlived, as soon, the corporations realised they could make even more money for their shareholders by moving overseas.
So. Long and short, deindustrialisation wasn’t just some random process, it was a cold, calculated manoeuvre by the corporations that owned these mills, in conjunction with cynical state and local governments in the South.
Bad Fashion and the Importance of History
September 17, 2014 § Leave a comment
Urban Outfitters is no stranger to controversy, having a long history of doing stupid things
and offering up offensive products to tasteless and tactless hipsters. A sample of the company’s idiocy sees anti-Semitic t-shirts and accessories, racist board games, and the like. But this week, we got an offensive sweatshirt. Urban Outfitters began selling a “vintage” Kent State University sweatshirt (at $120, a price only a clueless hipster would spend) that looked like it was spattered with blood, complete with what looked like bullet holes. This, of course, recalled the 1970 Kent State shootings, when four students were killed and nineteen injured when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed protesters. Almost immediately, the company was besieged with howls of protest, calling this move insensitive, at best (do a Twitter search for some more colourful responses). It then responded with a typical corporate nothing-speak empty apology:
If you click on the link in that tweet, you can read the end of this empty apology, which talks about sun-faded vintage clothing and discolourisation and “how saddened” the company was by public perception. Given the company’s history of provocation and offensive behaviour, I see nothing sincere here.
It’s been a bad stretch for clothing makers, last month, Spanish clothing retail giant Zara tried selling a children’s pyjama that recalled the uniform Jewish prisoners were forced to wear in concentration and death camps during the Holocaust. Faced with a similar storm of protest on Twitter and elsewhere, Zara withdrew the item and issued a similarly empty corporate apology. In its version of the gormless apology, Zara said this pyjama shirt was meant to recall the star sheriffs wore in the American West. Sure. Right.
I won’t even get into the downright daftness of hipsters wearing aboriginal headdresses. That’s an entire dissertation on stupidity, cultural appropriation, and a how-to guide on offensiveness. (There is, however, a Tumblr devoted to mocking hipsters in headdresses).
But all of this idiocy reinforces the importance of history and the impact a little bit of historical knowledge can have on the world. Someone in my Facebook feed today suggested that fashion companies simply hire someone to be an historian-minded vettter, to ensure plain, outright stupidity like this doesn’t happen. But the very fact that these two items of clothing actually got to market displays an epic failure of corporate oversight. In order for something to get from design to retail to production means that both items went through many checks, were seen by many eyes. And no one thought, “Hey, this is a bad idea.” Or, no one cared. Certainly, one can come to that conclusion vis-à-vis Urban Outfitters, given the serial nature of its offensiveness and lack of good corporate citizenship.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Stunning ‘Oops’ Moment
August 11, 2014 § 3 Comments
Malcolm Gladwell was on the BBC recently picking his Desert Island Discs. For the most part, it’s hard to argue with Gladwell’s choices, given his age and his Canadianness. I’m about a decade younger than him, and his choices look like the selections of someone’s cool older brother c. 1989, there’s BIlly Bragg, and Gillian Welch. Brian Eno’s there, so is Marvin Gaye. Gaye actually appears twice, with Gladwell choosing the classic deep cut, ‘Piece of Clay.’ But he also picked Gaye’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, which was allegedly the reference point for Bleeding Gums Murphy’s 45-minute version on The Simpsons. But, none of this really matters so much as Gladwell’s sheer, utter ignorance in introducing The Star Spangled Banner.
He claims that the American national anthem is an ‘insight into the heart of the American soul.’ Why? Because ‘[t]hey’re blowing stuff up. This is their national anthem, it’s about rockets and bombs.’
Gladwell is referring to the first verse of the song:
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
See? There’s the red glare of the rockets, bombs bursting in the air? All that nasty stuff, this deep insight into “the heart of the American soul.” Except. Gladwell is so wrong it’s embarrassing. The Star Spangled Banner is about the British attempting to level Baltimore the night of 13-14 September 1814 during the War of 1812. The author of this song was a lawyer named Frances Scott Key, who was stuck on a British frigate that night, watching the British attempt to reduce Baltimore’s defences to rubble. He was there because he had negotiated a prisoner swap with the British. The next morning, he was shocked to see Old Glory in the ‘dawn’s early light.’ Somehow, Fort McHenry survived the night and the flag still flew.
Scott was so overcome with emotion, he wrote The Star Spangled Banner almost on the spot. He set the lyrics to a common British drinking song that every American knew. Understand the irony: The Star Spangled Banner arose from the War of 1812, when the enemy was the British. It also had three more verses that, thankfully, have long since been forgotten.
There are many problems with The Star Spangled Banner. The major one is that anthem singers in the United States think that they must stretch their vocal chords to the breaking point (or quite often beyond) in singing the song. Interestingly, when the campaign to make the song the official American national anthem picked up steam in the era around the First World War (it finally happened in 1931), newspaper editors complained the song was ‘unsingable.’
But this is all beside the point of Gladwell’s stunning mis-step here, as he descends down into stupid, knee-jerk anti-Americanness. He should know better.
Immigration in the United States, plus ça change
August 7, 2014 § 8 Comments
I am doing a bit of research into the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and 50s in the United States. The Know Nothings were a secret society that eventually evolved into a political party, based on the premise that immigration was bad for the United States. In short, the Know Nothings, who also formed one of the bases of the nascent Republican Party in the late 1850s, were nativists. They believed in a United States for Americans only. We could, of course, note the irony of that statement, given every person not of Native American heritage in this country is of immigrant stock. But, we’ll leave that alone. They were called Know Nothings not because they were ignorant (as my students always suppose), but because, as a secret society and asked about the society replied that they “knew nothing.”
I came across this list of things that Roman Catholics hate about the United States from the Boston Know-Nothing and American Crusader in July 1854. The Know-Nothing and American Crusader was one of the main newspapers of the Know Nothings, and Boston was a major centre of the nativists. Boston was ground zero, in many ways, in the ‘invasion’ of Irish immigrants and refugees in the years of the Famine and afterwards. Here’s the list:
- They HATE our Republic, and are trying to overthrow it.
- They HATE the American Eagle, and it offends them beyond endurance to see it worn as an ornament by Americans.
- They HATE our Flag, as it manifest by their grossly insulting it.
- They HATE the liberty of conscience.
- They HATE the liberty of the Press.
- They HATE the liberty of speech.
- They HATE our Common School system.
- They HATE the Bible, and would blot it out of existence if they could!
- The Priests HATE married life, and yet by them is fulfilled the Scripture, to wit: ‘more are the children or the desolate, than the children of the married wife.’
- They HATE Protestants, and are sworn to exterminate them from our country and the earth.
- They HATE the name of Washington, because he was a Republican and Protestant.
- They HATE all rulers that do not swear allegiance to the Pope of Rome.
- They HATE to be ruled by Americans, and say “WE WILL NOT BE RULED BY THEM!”
- They HATE to support their own paupers and they are left to be supported by the tax paying Americans.
- They HATE, above all, the ‘Know Nothings,’ who are determined to rid this country of their accursed power.
The author of this wonderful list signed his name as “Uncle Sam.” Newspapers in general allowed correspondents to use anonymous pseudonyms in the 19th century, so this isn’t surprising. But the nom de plume of our correspondent is telling of the cause of the Know Nothings.
As I am doing this research, I’m thinking back to my experiences in June, when I was told by a table mate that the AP Reading I was at that I don’t belong in the United States because I “don’t love America” (I don’t “love” Canada, either, for the record). And, thenthen, on the way home, at a layover in Dallas, another traveller, watching the news, told me that all immigrants should be rounded up and deported (this one didn’t know I was an immigrant). And as I watch the drama unfold about the refugee children from Central America in this country, and see the horrible rhetoric coming from the right wing, I can’t help but think that, even if 170 years have passed since “Uncle Sam” published his list of things Catholics hate in The Know-Nothing and American Crusader, in some ways, nothing has changed. The rhetoric of “Uncle Sam” echoes that of some far right politicians, commentators, and regular citizens I’ve seen on Twitter in the past month.
Of course, the Know Nothings were never a majority of Americans, any more than those so violently opposed and hard-hearted to the plight of children today are even close to a majority. The overwhelming majority of Americans then and now do not have a problem with immigration and immigrants. But, then as now, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Research Note: Playing hockey against priests in Griffintown
June 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
As I noted in yesterday’s post on Frank Hanley, we really do live in a different era today. In one of the chapters of The House of the Irish, I talk about hockey in Griffintown in the 1950s and 60s. I interviewed Gordie Bernier, an old Griffintowner, a few summers ago about his life and growing up in Griff and his thoughts on it today. The previous weekend, he was playing in an old-timers hockey tournament in Pointe-Claire, so clearly it was a major part of his life. I can relate.
Bernier recalled playing with the Christian Brothers who ran the School for Boys in Griff and who liked to play hockey against the young men:
Keep your head up. But the league we had, we were only young…I was only, I think 17 or so, and we were playing against men, so some of the guys were older. It was a good experience….You keep your head up [laughs]. We used to go there, I think 8 in the morning to the rink on Basin, I lived other on Duke, we used to walk with our skates on, by the time we get over there if there was snow, give us the shovels, we had to clear off all the snow, and we’d play from 8 in the morning ‘til closing time, 10 at night. We were still there, play hockey all day at the weekend. Walk back, your ankles [were all swollen and sore].
Don Pidgeon, a man who has done more than anyone to create the memory of Griff as an Irish neighbourhood, also remembers playing the Brothers, and smashing one over the boards of the outdoor rink on Basin Street Park in Griffintown, with a hip check.
The Brothers, obviously, played hard, and they played to win. And the lads of Griffintown were not about to give any quarter, as David O’Neill recalls, the Brothers were
great athletes, and a lot of them liked the rough stuff just as much as the boys, and the older boys used to try to establish themselves among their own friends, and there were a few of the priests who used to give and take as good, or better. That generated the respect from the local community towards the priests, and a lot of people respected the priests for their ability to give and take without any complaining. No punishment, except that you got decked back when you weren’t looking.
Certainly, then, this was a different era, when decking a priest, or getting hit back as hard, if not harder, was a means by which the young men and priests earned each others respect, and that of their friends and colleagues, and the wider community.
Research Note: The Legend of “Banjo” Frank Hanley
June 5, 2014 § 1 Comment
I met Frank Hanley a couple of times back in the early aughts, including one afternoon in Grumpy’s on lower Crescent St. He was holding court, drinking, I think, a club soda. He was, at this point, already in his 90s. But he was irrepressible. Even though he was 96 or 97 when he died in 2006, I was still surprised to hear the news. He got the nickname sometime back in the 1920s or 30s when he was a minstrel player in Montreal, or so he told me. He didn’t know how to play the instrument. Hanley is the kind of guy that doesn’t exist anymore, which is kind of sad. He was the city councillor for St. Ann’s Ward from 1940 until 1970. He was also the MNA for St. Ann’s from 1948-70. He didn’t belong to any parties, he was always an independent. He tended to side with ‘Le Chef’, Maurice Duplessis, in the National Assembly during the 1950s. But I just never could hold that against him. He also despised Jean Drapeau, Mayor of Montreal from 1954-7 and from 1960-86.
Griffintown was left to die in the 1960s whilst the other neighbourhoods of the sud-ouest were given makeovers, mostly in the form of slum clearances and the building of housing projects in the Pointe, Burgundy, and Saint-Henri. Griff got the rénovations urbaines part, but that was it. Nothing was built to replace what was torn down. And it was not because of the 1963 re-zoning of the area as ‘light industrial.’ All of St. Ann’s Ward was, as were other parts of the sud-ouest. Griffintown, quite simply, did not attract the attention of hôtel de ville and Drapeau’s team of rénovationistes as a site of investment. The only voice demanding Griff get some love was its councillor: Hanley. Local legend has it that Griff was left to die to hurt Hanley’s re-election chances, such was Drapeau’s enmity for him.
Anyway. Hanley was an old school populist politicians, his first real concern was his constituents. And his constituents tended to be poor in Griffintown and the Pointe. He raised money for an emergency fund to help out his constituents when they ran into trouble. Most of this money was raised from other constituents. Occasionally, of course, a few dollars would fall into his own pocket. While today we would shake our heads at this or perhaps bring Hanley up on charges of corruption, in his era, no one had any problem with that.
In the summer of 1967, Hanley ran into trouble with Revenue Canada. He had been handing out over $150 per week to his constituents in trouble for much of the past decade, maybe longer. And, of course, he took a bit for himself. So Revenue Canada threatened to take his house at 500 Dublin St. in Pointe-Saint-Charles. His constituents from Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles had other ideas, and they showed up one morning in Hanley’s yard and proclaimed the ‘Republic of Hanley’ in his front yard.
In the end, Hanley and Revenue Canada reached a settlement.
The Problem(s) With Vikings
May 1, 2014 § 17 Comments
I recently began watching Vikings. I have two colleagues who are practically drooling over the show, so, one night when my brain was fried from work and my wife was off at her parents’, I began watching the first series. After watching Episode 1, I was not entirely sure why this was a show people got all excited about. After discussion with another friend, I was persuaded to keep going. So I binged watched, the first half of the first series in one night.
I had severe problems with the show. I’m no expert on the Vikings, though I am a big fan of Norse sagas, and I do deal with the stereotypes of the Vikings when I teach World History. I know enough to know what their culture was like, how they operated, etc. And therein lies the problem. In the first series, especially, I was deeply troubled by Gabriel Byrne’s character, Earl Haraldson. In part, Byrne was horrible in the show, rare for him. He was like a low-rent Sean Penn, between the bad hair and imperious character. But then there’s the problem with Earl Haraldson.
The Vikings lived in a kind of proto-democratic world, their leaders were not autocratic, nor could they afford to be, they required consent from the men they ruled. Interestingly, this is how the hero of the series, Ragnar Lothbrok, rolls. He asserted his authority and leadership over his men, but he did so because they trusted and respected them, and he treated them with respect and gave them some voice in decisions. Earl Haraldson, however, did not. He treated his subjects as if he was an absolutist monarch. The Vikings wouldn’t have tolerated an Earl operating like Haraldson, he would’ve been deposed and/or killed in short order. For example, Ragnar ignored Haraldson’s orders and sailed west towards England, where he plundered and brought back a small fortune with his men. Haraldson responded by confiscating nearly all of the bounty, allowing the men to keep only one item. I have a hard time believing a Viking leader would do that out of fear of upsetting his followers.
I last watched the episode where Ragnar kills Haraldson in a duel. Only at the end of his life did Haraldson act like a proper Viking leader, noting his fear (and respect) of Ragnar, a younger version of himself, and making allusions to the men who followed him and why they did. When Ragnar kills Haraldson, the rest of the men choose to follow Ragnar, who becomes the next earl. That, at least, is somewhat accurate.
I generally don’t worry too much about historical accuracy when I watch historical TV shows and movies. I recognise that story matters more than authenticity, but I also know (from my own experience, too, in working with writers, directors, and actors) that there are attempts to gain authenticity where it’s possible. Take, for example, Martin Scorcese’s The Gangs of New York. It is largely a horrible film, marred by Leonardo DiCaprio’s inability to act (though Daniel Day Lewis as Butcher Bill is brilliant). But I use the film when teaching Irish History or the Irish diaspora in the US, mostly because the setting of the film is generally pretty accurate, even if the story is not.
Vikings, however, isn’t so good at this. Other scholars have criticised it for everything from the clothing the characters wear to the depiction of the Vikings’ religion. Really, it’s a pretty bad TV show set in a fake Viking world (having said that, there is something incredibly compelling about it, I can’t stop watching it). But. When the showrunner, Michael Hirst, says “I especially had to take liberties with ‘Vikings’ because no one knows for sure what happened in the Dark Ages,” I’m just left flabbergasted.
Au contraire, we DO know a lot about what happened during the Middle Ages, and had Hirst bothered to educate himself, he would know better.
Black Death: Some context on the new research
April 2, 2014 § 4 Comments
The interwebs are all a-glow with news that Black Death in the 14th century wasn’t actually the bubonic plague. Rather, according to a new British study, it was pneumonic. This means that rather than being transmitted from bites from fleas (which originally came to Europe aboard the black rat, or rattus rattus, which itself was a stowaway in cargo coming from China and Mongolia), it was an airborne illness. Suddenly, every time I go to a news site in the past couple of days, I’m seeing headlines like this classic from FoxNews: “Black Death wasn’t actually bubonic plague.”
While I am certainly no expert in the matter, I have read a fair bit on Black Death because I have taught many sections of Western Civ and World History, and Black Death is central to the narrative. Plus it’s great fun to go into excruciating detail of the physical symptoms with my students, seeing who turns green first. And what I’ve learned from my reading is this: Black Death was actually three kinds of plague:
1) Bubonic plague: transmitted by bites from infected fleas and the most common of the three strains of plague. This is characterised by High fever, aching joints, swelling of lymph nodes, and buboes (which are red lesions on the body and from whence the term we used as kids for cuts, booboos, comes from). The bubonic plague had an 80% mortality rate.
2) Pneumonic plague: airborne, infects the lungs; symptoms include high fevers, cough, coughing up blood, throwing up blood. The mortality rate for the pneumonic plague was 95%.
3) Septicemic plague: infects blood and the least common strain. Symptoms include high fever and purpura, purple skin patches, bleeding from mouth, nose and/or rectum, vomiting, organ failure. The mortality rate was 100%.
So what appears to be the results of this new study in London doesn’t actually overturn all that we think we know about the plague, as the news reports are suggesting. At most, it changes percentages, in terms of how many people came down with bubonic v. pneumonic v. septicemic plague. Not exactly the earth-shattering news the media is claiming this to be.
And then I wonder if this is a research #fail or if this is a journalism #fail?
Slave Narratives and the Carolina Chocolate Drops
March 31, 2014 § 6 Comments
Last night, we were up in Woodstock, VT, to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band from Durham, North Carolina. The band is comprised of three African-Americans and fronted by Rhiannon Giddens, who is of mixed white, black, and aboriginal descent, they play a mixture of traditional and modern folk/roots instruments. They’ve revived a number of songs from the slave era in the Deep South, most of which, according to Giddens, were set down in the 1850s, just before the onset of the Civil War. Most of these, however, come without lyrics, for perhaps obvious reasons. The band were incredibly talkative on the stage last night, which created an incredible community vibe inside this small theatre in small-town Vermont. Both Giddens and band mate Hubby Jenkins kept up a running monologue with the crowd, telling us about their songs, how they came to perform them, write them, play them, their traditional instruments, and so on.
Before one song, Giddens told us about her explorations of American history, specifically African-American history, and about a book she read that collated slave narratives, and analysed them collectively, as opposed to the usual individuated approach to slave narratives. However, Giddens also noted one story that stuck out for her, about a slave woman named Julie at the tail end of the Civil War, as the Union Army was coming over the crest of the hill towards the plantation that Julie lived on. Julie is standing with her Mistress, watching them approach in the song, “Julie.”
This video was shot last night, by someone sitting close by us, though I don’t know who shot it, I didn’t see it happening. This is one powerful song, and it got me thinking. I’m teaching the Civil War right now in my US History class, and as I cast about for sources I am intrigued by slavery apologists, then and now, who argue that the slaves were happy. But even more striking are the stories about slave owners who were shocked to their core when the war ended and their slaves took their leave quickly, looking to explore their freedom.
It seems that the slave owners had really convinced themselves that they and their slaves were “friends” and that their slaves loved them. That arrogance seems astounding to me in the early 21st century. But this song last night powerfully brought the story right back around.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day: “Race” and the “True Celt”
March 17, 2014 § 2 Comments
I’m currently finishing off my Griffintown manuscript, and continuing the endless revisions of the PhD dissertation it was based on. By this point, “based on” is loose, like when movies claim to be based on a book, but you can’t really see the book in the movie. Anyway, right now I’m revising the sections on Irish nationalist sentiment amongst the Irish-Catholics of Griff in the early 20th century. And so, I’m reading Robert McLaughlin’s Irish Canadian Conflict and the Struggle for Irish Independence, 1912-1925. McLaughlin’s work, like mine, is part of a growing movement amongst historians to challenge a decades-old belief amongst Canadian historians that Irish Catholics in Canada couldn’t care less about what happened in Ireland. This is a refreshing change.
McLaughlin, unlike most of us who study the Irish in Canada, focuses on both sides of the divide, looking at both Catholics and Protestants. This is what makes his book so valuable. Off the top of my head, McLaughlin’s is the only book-length study to look at the Protestant Irish response to agitations for Home Rule and outright independence for Ireland in Canada.
As such, McLaughlin spends a fair amount of time discussing Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists in Ireland. I talked about Carson in class the other week in discussing Home Rule and Unionism. I had a picture of him up on the screen, blown up behind me. When I turned around, I kind of jumped, not really expecting Sir Edward to be so big and glaring at me.
The picture, however, is beautiful. Sir Edward looks out contemptuously at his audience, his lips pursed into a sour look, as if he had just smelled some Catholics. His jawbone is fierce, and his hair slicked back. He looks for all the world like a hard man. But, of course, he wasn’t. He was a knighted politician. But he was also the perfect avenue into discussing the “manliness problem” of the late Victorian/Edwardian British Empire, and the response, created by Lord Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts, “muscular Christianity.” Sir Edward looks like he could tear you a new one as easily as argue the merits of Unionism versus Home Rule. And, in turn, this allowed me a direct entré into the Gaelic Athletic Association’s concept of “muscular Catholicism,” which turned muscular Christianity on its ear for Catholic Irish purposes.
At any rate, back to McLaughlin and his quoting of Sir Edward. Sir Edward wrote to his former Conservative Party colleague, Sir John Marriott in 1933, long after Irish independence and the partitioning of Ireland:
The Celts have done nothing in Ireland but create trouble and disorder. Irishmen who have turned out successful are not in any case that I know of true Celtic origin.
I find this humourous. See, by Sir Edward’s day, there was no such thing as a “true Celt” (not that Irish nationalists didn’t speak this same language). By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, were a wonderful mixture of Celtic Irish, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Spanish, English, Welsh, Scots, and so on that no one was a “pure Celt” or pure anything. But, of course, that myth persisted and still persists today.
I still have people come up to me today, in the early years of the 21st century, and want to discuss the “real Irish” or the “pure Irish” or the “real Celts” in Ireland. After disabusing them of the notion that there is such a thing (anywhere in the world, quite frankly, we’re all mutts, no matter our various ethnic heritages), I am left to just shake my head.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
