Today in Labor History May 31, 1889: The infamous Johnstown Flood. 2,209 people died when a dam holding back a private resort lake burst upstream from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It was the deadliest U.S. disaster to date. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati. It caused $17 million of damage (about $490 million in 2020 dollars).
Wealthy industrialists, like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick owned and patronized the resort. (Carnegie also owned Homestead Steel, and Frick was the manager in charge of the butchering of striking workers that occurred there in 1892). They had built cottages and a clubhouse and created the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive and private mountain retreat. They had also lowered the dam to build a road across it and installed a fish screen in the spillway that tended to trap debris. Investigators believe these alterations contributed to the disaster. Yet none of the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were found guilty of any crimes. Furthermore, survivors repeatedly lost court cases in their attempts to recover damages due to the club members’ wealth and expensive legal team. However, public outrage did prompt changes in American law leading to one of strict liability in future cases.
The flood has been depicted repeatedly in American culture. Bruce Springsteen references it in “Highway Patrolman.” Rudyard Kipling talked about it in his novel “Captains Courageous.” The Paul Newman film, “Slapshot” takes place in Johnstown. It is also referenced in episodes of Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and dozens of other poems, songs, plays, novels, and works of nonfiction.
@MikeDunnAuthor
But just think if Carnegie had been forced to pay reparations then or more than a subsistence wage to his factory workers- he might never have become the philanthropist who built all the libraries with his name emblazoned on them or the famous Carnegie Hall.
Many thousand human lives-
Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,
(Worse than Herod's awful crime)
Sent to heaven before their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!
All the horrors that hell could wish,
Such was the price that was paid for— fish!
A drone view shows Coca-Cola boxes and bottles floating in the water near trucks, amid flooding in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli
Steve Bannon isn't wrong: for his brand of nihilistic politics to win, all he has to do is "flood the zone with shit," demoralizing people to the point where they no longer even try to learn the truth.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is really just a more refined, more potent version of the tactical doubt sown by Big Tobacco about whether smoking caused cancer, a playbook later adopted by the fossil fuel industry to sell climate denial. You know Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How To Lie With Statistics? Huff was a Big Tobacco shill (his next book, which wasn't ever published, was How To Lie With Cancer Statistics).
There's some solid science in this article by @pluralistic, including the observation that "...chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of light, which is notably lacking in your colon"
More importantly, though, he illustrates that the world is complicated and if you just shrug and say it's too complicated or nobody really knows, you're helping the worst of the forces to win. Having a good info environment requires effort to learn and understand complexity.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1928: The St. Francis Dam failed in Los Angeles, California, killing 431 people. It is the second deadliest disaster in California, after the 1906 earthquake, and one of the worst U.S. civil engineering disasters ever. A defective foundation and design flaws caused the failure. Yet, the inquest absolved chief engineer, William Mulholland, of all criminal responsibility, and he continued to earn a salary from the Bureau of Public Works (though his career was effectively ended). The authorities continued to find the remains of victims of the flood until the mid-1950s. Many of the victims were washed out to sea. Some washed ashore as far south as Mexico. Mulholland was also the designer of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, which sucks water from the Owens Valley and is a major cause of the depletion of the fragile Mono Lake. As its water levels continues to decline, it threatens the world’s second largest gull rookery, home to up to 50,000 birds. The aqueduct’s construction, and the shady methods Mulholland used to acquire the water rights, led to the California Water Wars between L.A. County and Owens Valley farmers. Many of those same Anglo farmers (or their predecessors) usurped the land from Piute people during the 1863 Owens Valley Indian War, which was precipitated, in part, by the vast loss of human and cattle lives, and the displacements, caused by the Megaflood of 1861, which inundated much of the West, from Idaho and Oregon, down to northern Baja California. The corruption related to the construction of the aqueduct has been portrayed in the film Chinatown, and in the nonfiction book, “Cadillac Desert.”
@MikeDunnAuthor@bookstadon I lived n the Owens Valley and that aqueduct was, and remains, a symbol of theft, greed, and oppression to the Piaute and Shoshone Tribes. Racism and White Privilege born from that project still thrives there.
Flood-affected people use a makeshift raft to shift their lamb to a safer place following heavy rains at the Patiapam village
Flood-affected people use a makeshift raft to shift their lamb to a safer place following heavy rains at the Patiapam village in Nagaon district, in the northeastern state of Assam, India. REUTERS/Anuwar Hazarika
A drone photo shows a flooded area in Fujian province, south-east China. Southern China was reeling from heavy rains that triggered landslides killing at least nine people, knocking out power for entire villages and burying crops
Pailona Ramirez from Guarani people looks on during rain at Pindo Poty village after it was flooded, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. REUTERS/Adriano Machado