Welcome to Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org. I'm series host Beth English and today we're speaking with Jacob Remus, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and History at SUNY Empire State College. His new book is Disaster Citizenship, Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era, published by the University of Illinois Press.
Jacob Remus, welcome to Working History. Thanks very much. So your book, Disaster Citizenship, focuses on how ordinary people responded to natural disasters and how that began to change in the early 20th century. So I'm wondering if you can give us just a brief overview of the book before we launch into more of the substance and also what do you mean by disaster citizenship?
Absolutely. Well, the book really starts with the question of how did people respond to the growth of the state in the Progressive Era? In the Progressive Era you get all of these new ideas of what the state should be doing for its citizens, ideas of relief and rescue relieving the poor, relieving widows, rescuing people from rescuing children from factories. And all of these ideas come, of course, famously, of course, come with new types of knowledge and new types of people doing that work, social workers, for instance, or newly professionalized soldiers.
And so my question was how did ordinary people respond to that? And one of the ways into that is to think about disasters because disasters are a moment in which there's all of a sudden a lot more need and in which for a long time the government has responded to that need. But in the Progressive Era you start getting a response that's bigger, more professionalized, run by social workers. The answer was what I called a disaster citizenship, which was a sort of complex answer.
One was part of it was that people really wanted that help. They weren't saying no. In fact, they tried their hardest to maximize the aid, the material aid, the money, the in-kind aid that the government would give them. Sometimes even doing what the government considered fraud or cheating in some way.
At the same time, they wanted, perhaps not surprisingly, they wanted the least amount, they wanted to give up the least amount of power and authority over their own lives. And so when it came, for instance, immediately after disasters, I was looking at when there was a housing shortage because the fire had burned down houses or the explosion had destroyed the houses. Where did people go? If they could, they really avoided going to the official shelters or the tents that the army had set up because when they did that, they had to give up power over their lives.
They had to live in the way the soldiers told them to. They had to watch their children when they were told they had to eat the food they were given. So people preferred often in much worse physical conditions in order to keep that power over their own lives. So disaster citizenship refers to that sort of balancing act.
And one of the ways they balanced was to build solidarity with each other. So you see unions organizing on more inclusive lines. You see churches sort of coming together and figuring out new ways of being in the world. So disaster citizenship, I mean, in this progressive era context is something very specific.
Trying to limit the power of social workers over individual lives. Trying to, crossing borders at a moment in which the borders were getting hardened in response to large immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But at the same time, I also want to think of disaster citizenship as something that's not historically bounded. It's what we do after any disaster in which we reimagine what our relationship is with the states.
And so we see it after Katrina, we see it after Sandy as people. Try to figure out what should we assist and expect from the state and what should we demand from the state. That's really interesting. And just real quickly before we talk a little bit more about your case studies, when you say the state or the government, are we talking about states as in the US states?
Are we talking about the national government? Are we talking about both in terms of disaster response? So we're talking about both. The federal government takes on more responsibility for disaster relief.
Although in fact, Congress has appropriated a disaster relief to victims since the early days of the republic, I think 1807 is the first one. But it is absolutely growing. Salem, the Salem Fire, which is one of the disasters I write about, was, Salem received $200,000 from the federal government. Someone from the Quartermaster Corps eventually arrives to give it out.
Plus it's actually a moment in which the labor, the brand new labor department, US labor department starts to organize the US employment service, which was designed to shift workers around the country in a sort of more rational way, so that if there were too many workers in Massachusetts, they could go to Weber, Maryland, where there was a need for them. And Salem had actually sort of accessed a test run for that project. But it's also municipal government. It's also state government.
In fact, I also write about Canada, where there's also obviously a federal system, but the lines are somewhat different. To me, what's really important is to use Jim Scott's phrase, who sees like a state. And so the people who are seeing like a state or who I am calling a state, and some of those people are actually working technically for private organizations, or for social workers who are working for the charity organization society, or something that is quasi-private. And this is, of course, one of the things that we think about in American welfare history is what Michael Cauck calls the franchise states, that there's this total mixing between public and private, and the money flows in both directions, and the authority flows in both directions.
But to me, what's important is how are people thinking and how are people knowing and trying to understand the people who are helping? Okay, great. And so you mentioned just real briefly a couple of the examples that you give in your book. So let's talk just again kind of briefly about your case studies.
You focus on Salem and Halifax. And so can you just tell us a little bit about those two places, those two, the design disasters that happen in those two places, and also why you chose them for this particular study? Of course. So Salem and Halifax were both port cities around 50,000 people in the period we're looking at.
Both have some industry. Salem, in fact, is at this point a common industrial city with textile manufacturing and leather industry. The Salem Fire in 1914 starts in a Latin leather factory, and it spreads around the city, and about 18,000 people are made homeless or jobless. And of those families, actually not the people, but other families, 43% are French Canadians, or they're French-Canadian descendants.
So Salem is an industrial city. It's full of immigrants, French-Canadians, Irish, Poles. Those are the three big groups, I guess. But big industrial fires, and we think of Chicago, of course, but also of course, San Francisco, or Boston.
There were these massive fires throughout the 19th century in North America, and they really come, start coming to an end because firefighting technology gets better, firefighting professionalism improves, and actually the coming of the automobile improve stops it both because you get fire trucks arriving more quickly and also streets are clearer because cars need goals and other flammable stuff sitting in the middle of the street, spreading the fire when it comes. So Salem is one of the last of these big industrial conflagrations that spread throughout the city, and one of the ways you can see that is almost nobody dies. You get these 18,000 homeless or jobless, and I think the death toll is six or something, something very minimal. Three and a half years later, in December 1917, in the middle of World War I, towards the end of World War I, there's a munition ship explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
A munition ship, waiting to go off to the front in France, collides with another ship. It sparks a fire, and it's a massive explosion. People like calling it the largest explosion, the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb, but that doesn't actually have very much meaning when you start thinking about what it means to have a big explosion, but that gives a sense of how big it is. About 2,000 people die, about 25,000 people are made homeless or jobless.
So in many ways, these are not commensurate disasters. There's much more suffering in Halifax than in Salem, but you could get these interesting similarities in terms of how people respond. I chose them largely because of this Canada connection that you have Canadians in the United States or the descendants of Canadians in the United States in Salem. You get Canadians, obviously, in Halifax.
Halifax is also the whole maritime. Canada has generations of outmigration largely to New England. You get a lot of negotiations in Massachusetts, famously in Halifax, gives a lot of aid to Halifax. Part of that aid was that the same people, literally the same three people who helped design the relief system in Salem get on a train and go to Halifax and design the relief system in Halifax.
So I was just going to follow up on that, sort of taking from there. What were the responses then to these disasters? You mentioned the three people that went from disaster A and moved to disaster B and sort of set up the response to that. So if you could talk a little bit about that, and then also the progressive area is very much about notions of order and disorder.
And I'm curious to know how those sort of conceptualizations of order and disorder shaped these responses. Yes, so the official response is all about trying to reestablish order. If you think about the people who were doing the work of relief, who tended to be club women and sort of progressive reformer men, their image of the city was something that could be knowable through reports and forms filled out in Triplekit and reading documents, right? This point knew way of understanding the city through study.
And all of a sudden when the disaster comes, none of those things work anymore. The city directories are outdated, the maps are wrong, the maps depict streets that aren't there anymore. And so what they really want to do is reestablish order. And you get these fascinating comments about how we fulfilled the immediate emergent needs of coal or for coal or for blankets or for food with a minimum of red tape.
But then you actually look at what they were doing and they were filling out massive amounts of paperwork for each form, for each amount of coal that they give. So Halifax, the Halifax explosion was in December and it was cold. And one of the first things people needed was coal or blankets. And the very first day people go to the city hall to go to this very quickly established relief committee.
And there are all of these, all this paper being produced, which is one of the reasons it's a good thing to study because there's all this paper being produced. Good for historians, right. And in Halifax all the paper gets kept. That's actually very, in Salem none of the paper gets kept.
But Halifax, all of this paper is still there sitting in the archives. In fact the Mormons have microfilmed a lot of this, which is great for people who want to do subsequent work. There's this demand for writing it down. There's a lot of concern about who should be getting aid and who shouldn't.
And so there's a desire for authority figures, often priests or doctors or ministers. Sometimes if those can't be found, any middle class person who's around the shop, like the owner of a store, can vouch for somebody. And so form is assigned and countersigned. From the top then there's that real desire for regularity, for knowledge, for committee structure, right.
So in Halifax, actually in Salem too, they spend tremendous amounts of time arguing with each other about what form the relief committee should take. And the first several meetings are about naming people to this committee and that committee and who's going to be on the subcommittee. And they read out their minutes and they read out their reports from who's talking to the banks and who's doing and who's sending what telegram and not a lot of actual work being done. So they're not going to the right to the relief station.
They're asking for aid for which maybe they're not entitled. They haven't gotten their form assigned by the correct minister. So there's this fear of this disorderly mass who's going to mess everything up when they're trying to do things the right way, the right orderly way. Meanwhile, the affected people, the ordinary people, they are actually creating an order that makes a lot of sense to them.
So the first thing that they do is, most people do is go and check on their family. That is a form of order because it is following these pre-these people. These pre-established networks, they are checking on people. They're doing actual importance to rescue work when they go to their family's house and find someone trapped under a board and rescue them.
But it looks really disorderly because people are running around the city. They're leaving work without permission. They're going towards the explosion instead of where the explosion was or towards where the fire is instead of away from it. They're rescuing the wrong things.
So one of the things you get in Salem is criticism of people for taking, as the fire's coming and taking stuff from their houses. That's an observer. Things is not very valuable. When the observer then becomes the displaced person, he understands very well that some things have sentimental value that is not apparent to the outsider.
So you get these sorts of questions about what order and disorder means. And one of the ways that you see that is in fears of looting. One of the things we know from social scientists who have spent 50 years researching is that there's actually very little looting after disaster. And what looting there is tends to be sort of salvage.
It's the finding food, finding medical supplies, not taking consumer goods. And yet in lots of disasters, we see this now, but in the progressive era, you get a lot of real fear of who's going to take stuff. And so you get a lot of attention on law enforcement. You send in the army to enforce people not being on the streets or if they have to have passes to show they're on the street to show why they're on the street.
And A, that means of course these soldiers and these police officers who could be doing something useful aren't. And it also means that people can't go where they need to go. They can't go. And if there's a soldier blocking the street and saying, sorry, we think they're going to be a looter.
So you can't go here. It means you can't go and check on your mother. It means you can't go and find your friends. And so the desire for sort of a legible top down order often disrupts the bottom up less legible order.
What are the broader connections then of labor and working class history to disasters? Well, part of it is that disasters are a moment in which people practice a lot of solidarity. One of the things we see a lot in disasters is what we call post disaster altruism of people helping each other in the immediate aftermath or a little bit after the immediate aftermath to help find each other, help dig out survivors or bodies. And my argument is that that post disaster altruism is not necessarily political but can be and often is politicized.
So you get from that memory of the solidarity that happens right after the explosion or the fire, you can get new forms of organizing a union. So in both Halifax and in Salem, you get much bigger unions and you get new ideas of unionization. So in the largest employer in Salem, which is a chic factory, burns it down and gets rebuilt. And in the rebuilt chic factory, it's called the Numbkegg Steem Copping Company.
There is an industrial union when other textile workers in Massachusetts were rejecting industrial unionism. Salem has an industrial union, multi-ethnic, both men and women. And then throughout the 20s, experiments with these new forms of what a union can do. So they build a tremendous amount of power for the union in running the factory, including the union essentially takes over adopts scientific management but runs the committee that does the efficiency work.
This ends in problems when the head of the union becomes autocratic, a mayor may not own stock and the company turns out to be a boss in unionist clothing. By the 30s, there's a rebellion against him and the communists come in. And there's a whole new generation, a whole new set of issues. But in the aftermath of the fire, you get these new ideas about how do we come together?
How can we as ordinary people rebuild this community that we had in the aftermath of the fire? In Halifax, there's a lot of work rebuilding. And it's in the context of this emergency of the post-exclusion, it's in the context of the war of World War I. But you still get a huge boom in the number of unionized carpenters.
For instance, the Halifax trades and labor council, the equivalent of local federation becomes the largest such organization in Canada because so many workers are needed to do that rebuilding work. So we're supposed to create a new work opportunities but also these new ideas of how do we come together and express and build solidarity. And what was the relationship between, for instance, the organized unions that you reference to carpenters or whoever they might be? And the progressives, the club folks, the municipal administrators, was it kind of an easy relationship?
Were they working together? Were they not? I'm thinking from my own work in terms of progressive Arab labor laws. You often have these two groups with similar interests but there's a lot of tension between the two.
And I didn't know if in the context of disasters, if that was the same, if it was different, if it's one of those moments where right after the disaster everybody comes together but then that kind of dissipates. What was the situation like there? There's a lot of rhetoric of everybody coming together. There's a lot of tension.
There's a sort of short answer particularly in how facts are really the best example of it in which there's this big relief commission that gets established by the federal government that has $30 million which is obviously a huge amount of money in 1970. And they have this power to rebuild, their developer, their city planning agency. They're also giving the relief to help people get their, give them cash to help them reestablish their lives. And that gets wrapped up in, so there's this wrapped up in this rhetoric of we, the government, the relief commission are going to in a disinterested way do what is best for the city to rebuild.
And these workers who are demanding overtime or are demanding shorter hours or who are demanding more money are standing in the way of rebuilding. The progressive rhetoric of disinterest and of sort of technocracy is seen as opposite of the more particularistic demands made by workers. In Salem it's a bit more complicated in that the union in the sheet factory ends up being sort of progressive and technocratic and that they adopt scientific management. But part of where that plays out in the more immediate aftermath is a recall election against the mayor.
So Salem has had a sort of, I think of a sort of a traditional Boston Irish versus Yankee fight for a generation or for 15 years before the fire. And the French Canadians are on the Yankee side in Salem. They're not always but they happen to be in Salem. And so in that instance there is this alliance between the Protestants, progressives or people who are thinking of themselves as progressives and the ethnic workers who I'm looking at against another set of ethnic workers.
So it's mixed I would say as the answer. And again there's a lot of rhetoric of everybody coming together but there is definitely this tension. And the tension really as I would say always it does revolves around who's going to have power is the middle class reformers going to have power in the end and use it to help others perhaps but have the power for themselves or workers going to have power. And the alliances work for as long as it doesn't matter but once there's any divergence it falls apart.
What assessment who sort of came out prevailing in terms of the reconstruction of Halifax and of Salem after these disasters? Was it the unions? Was it the progressives or did it end up kind of being a mix that emerged in the rebuilt areas of these two places? Oh I would love to say it was a mix.
But so as it was more of a mix in Salem, in Salem the union really does grow and take a lot of power in the 20s. And I would say they probably win there. Although again as I say it's a very mixed win that because of internal union dynamics it all falls apart and turns out to be a massive failure by the 30s. In Halifax absolutely the unions lose.
In Halifax by the mid 20s the labor movement has been entirely broken in Halifax and there's and there's a turn to what's called the maritime rights movement instead of a class movement. In the maritime rights movement you can sort of see it as a sort of nationalist conservative cross-class politics. There's both an election in which is a labor party that comes in second province wide as a former labor coalition that's the official opposition in the provincial legislature but they only win a single seat in Halifax. And at the same time there's a really big strike in the shipyards that is crushed and they lose the union shot.
They lose everything essentially in Halifax. Again it's kind of a contingent story but at best mixed. Okay so let's shift gears just a bit and talk about your methodology about how you got at these stories. You had mentioned earlier in the discussion about the progressives' penchant for paperwork and how they documented everything to the last detail and yet you said in the Halifax case they're all still there in the Salem case not.
So how did you approach that and equalize that as you were looking at these two disasters together? It was really tough. Halifax is a dream come true. Everyone who received any aid had these forms called face sheets which I learned recently.
It's a phrase that social workers still use for the demographic sheet that you started to file with. And so it says who was in each family? What organizations? What churches and what unions they belong to?
How much money they all made? Where they owned or they rented? Where they were now? Where are their families?
You could do an entire project just based on it. And then every time they had any contact with the relief committee there was a paragraph written about what happened and who was given what? You could do an infinite number of urban history projects based on these documents. And it also exists in a weird arbitrary order.
But I sampled them. I did a very oddly social scientific thing. I did a simple random sample and I looked at every six of the box and have a big database. Take note people looking for new projects.
But yeah, go ahead. All interested in Canadian urban history do it. It's amazing. Plus there was a guy named Ultra Ball McMecken who was a kind of a man of letters.
He was a professor in librarian at Dalhousie University who got himself appointed the official disaster historian. And he essentially did oral histories with people, mostly middle class people because there's other people he knew. But an entire collection of reports that were collected at the time and oral histories that he collected in the months afterwards. And so this is incredible wealth of what people were doing, who they were doing it with.
Really amazing, amazing resource. And Salem had those same face sheets. I saw the link versions of them. But they were not that.
So incredibly frustrating. Why weren't they kept? Were they just destroyed as part of reading out records? Yeah.
So actually most of them, I think that these forms were used, they were developed by the American Red Cross. And I think that they were used in almost every disaster. And as far as I know, in this period, as far as I know, they exist only still in Halifax because in Halifax they were used, people received pensions. And widows received pensions and blind people received pensions for the rest of their lives.
And so you have people receiving pensions from the Relief Commission into the 1960s, maybe into the 70s. And so these files were kept because the bureaucracy continued to exist. Whereas in most places, the bureaucracy is created and then very quickly, as soon as it's not needed, gets dismantled. And then presumably all of their stuff gets chucked in the dumpster.
So the really unusual one is how it affects, that it's kept rather than it's unusual that Salem is thrown away. And so for Salem, I sort of did traditional social history stuff. I read the newspaper. I looked at church records and union records when they existed.
The union story that I keep talking about, it was fortuitously a couple of Yale researchers got interested in the story in the late 20s and early 30s and went and did a lot of interviews and their papers all still exist. So it was much more little bits here and there. And so it's really uneven. Those sort of spaces are really uneven.
Halifax, almost everything comes from these two or three collections. How Salem comes from a bit here or bit there. And in some way, it made me work a lot harder for the Salem section. And in some ways, I think that that made, at this point, after many revisions, I think it's even now.
So I think it made the original draft, the dissertation version, the Salem portions better, because it wasn't just a recitation of here's what I found in a particular collection. It was, I really had to do the work of here's one newspaper, here's a second newspaper, here's a close reading of a photograph. It had to be much more creative. So I'm able to ask different questions of the, and this is where the comparative piece is really helpful.
I was able to ask different questions of each of the disasters. I could see how the relief money affected family economies in Halifax because I could see how much people were making and I could see them receiving pensions into the 20s. So once I was able to understand that in Halifax, I was able to then look at Salem in a different way and say, what should I be looking for in Salem? How did families respond in Salem?
And I couldn't see in as much detail by looking at their earnings records. But it meant it told me where to look in the newspaper, told me how to read these stories in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise. And the union story in Salem, and that a church story also in Salem that helped me read Halifax in a different way. I was able to speak to the sources for church history in Salem because of the Catholic, the cardinal in Boston at the time had really kept all of his correspondence in a way that in Halifax, churches didn't have, but I was able to ask different questions and therefore go back to Halifax and say, what should I be looking at?
That's really interesting. And this might seem like a strange question to ask about a book focused on New England and Maritimes Canada, but given this is the Southern Labor Studies Association, what role does the US-Aath and sort of approaches to Southern history play in your thinking and in your work generally? It's kind of a biographical answer. I started this project 10 years ago in the wake of Katrina.
Literally, and the Katrina happened, it was my second year of graduate school and I was taking an urban history, a seminar on urban history of North America with Sally Deutsch and she, we were reading on, I mean, had been pre-scheduled on a syllabus that we were going to read Carl Smith's book on the Chicago Fire. And he talks about, and that book he talks about these stories of looting and divitulant of some that come out of the fire that are not, that are clearly untrue. And he's a very literary historian. He reads these texts, is what did they tell us about the cities and how people imagine cities.
And fears of ordering disorder. And Sally says to us, we're going through the book, it was the first week of class, we're reading, we're going through the syllabus. And that's the week of Katrina where we're hearing all of these stories of the rapes and the murders and the looting coming out of New Orleans. And Sally says to us, mark my words, in a month we're going to learn that it's not true.
And sure enough, she was right in a month or two months, actually, it started coming out in a week. We started hearing this counter narrative of Katrina in which it was not people being animalistic and violent when the state goes away. And what's what was needed was the army or the police or whoever. In fact, it was the opposite.
It was that people came together and they practiced mutual aid and sure there was some looting, but that was to get water and food and medicine or it was sort of symbolic violence against perceived oppressors. In fact, it was the National Guard and the police who were really creating disorder and who were sowing fear and who were preventing people from helping each other. So very similar to the story you ended up telling then. Absolutely.
Absolutely. So that was sort of the beginning of my research for this. I really framed, I mean, in the book I actually start the introduction, starts with a discussion about Katrina. It really framed all of my work was thinking about contemporary disaster and in the United States that particularly often means hurricanes, which are particularly a southern thing.
But the other answer is that I was writing a dissertation at Duke and the triangle has this really remarkable collection of historians who are engaged in labor and civil rights history in a way that is very much about creating a usable past. That North Carolina has the lowest union density rate in the country and that is on, you can't be a labor historian in North Carolina, even if you're studying Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, you can't be a labor historian in North Carolina without being very aware of that and about thinking about that. And one of the things I think is really important and it came out of that experience of living and working in the South was that we need to be thinking about new ways of organizing and new ways of building a culture of solidarity, which may not be workplace based or which may not be a NLRB recognized collective bargaining agent. And I think that the way that you see people come together and practice solidarity and build on that solidarity after disasters can offer clues about how to do that.
The idea of disaster citizenship where after a disaster people renegotiate and contest what it means to be part of society and what citizenship should be. I think I hope that that can be not just useful in after a literal disaster, after a hurricane or earthquake or whatever, but that that can be helpful to think about how we should be rebuilding a labor movement everywhere, but particularly in the South. Okay. And I think that's a really that's a really great place perhaps to end our discussion today with bringing your story from the early 20th century to issues that we're thinking about now in the early 21st century about contemporary disaster relief and contemporary labor politics and organizing.
Jacob Remus, thank you very much for talking about disaster citizenship with us on working history and we'll be looking forward to your next project. Great. Thanks. It was a lot of fun.
Thank you again to Jacob Remus, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and History at SUNY Empire State College. His book is Disaster Citizenship, Survivors, Solidarity and Power in the Progressive Era, published by the University of Illinois Press. And thank you for joining us for this episode of Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Visit us online and become a member at www.southernlaboresteadies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.