Since I broke my wrist in January and have been unable to work, I have spent a lot of time watching TV through Netflix on my computer. I mentioned to my roommate, who has been a Netflix addict for some time, that the $7.99 per month that I will spend to access the streaming service has been the best entertainment investment that I have made in years (even if it has taken some time away from my blogging)! With my profound interest in politics, I have quite easily become addicted to the Netflix series "House of Cards." I've spent a lot of time watching network TV shows from the 70s (e.g. "M.A.S.H.", the original "Battlestar Galactica"), 80s ("Cheers"), and 90s ("Quantum Leap") that I always enjoyed when they were on prime time or reruns. And I've watched a handful of movies that I had always meant to watch when they were in the cinemas (of which, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" on the Irish war of independence was well done if somber and mournful in its closing frames). I mentioned to my roommate that I have a brand new VHS copy of "Good Will Hunting" with Matt Damon and Robin Williams, still in the wrapper and the box that I received it in from the movies by mail service that I bought it through back in the 90s. It is sitting somewhere in the deep dark realm of my storage box in Hatfield where I put all of my excess belongings after I moved out of a one-bedroom apartment I lived in from 2002 to 2008. Last night, I finally got around to watching "Good Will Hunting" the easy way - I streamed it off Netflix, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Finally, I have indulged in watching a fair number of documentaries, which, given my persistent preference for non-fiction, hold a strong appeal for me. I haven't gotten around to re-watching Ken Burns' Civil War and Baseball series from PBS yet, but I made a point to place each on my favorites list, in addition to several episodes of "Frontline" that I missed on trips down to watch our local PBS station down at my dad's house. In general, I appreciate documentaries coming off of PBS and I have also enjoyed and felt informed by the few TED Talks that I have watched. Then there have been a handful of other documentaries and/or quasi-documentaries/dramatizations, straddling the line been journalistic partisan neutrality and implicit propaganda. Two particular "documentaries" stand out in my mind. The first, "Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve," a 2013 documentary on the role of the Federal Reserve in the collapse of the housing bubble and subsequent "Great Recession," was very well done, journalistic in character, and informative, but it evinced a certain monetarist undertone, suggesting that the Federal Reserve should have pursued a more strict, tight-money policy to defend the value of the dollar and avoid the creation of new investment bubbles in the aftermath of the dot-com bust of 2000-2001. In general, I think the documentary lacked sufficient contextual analysis explaining how the particular evolution of the U.S. financial sector as a whole led to the conditions for a boom and a collapse in secondary mortgage markets. As such, it tends to unfairly lay the blame for the Great Recession entirely at the feet of the Federal Reserve in its efforts to exercise an aggressive counter-cyclical monetary policy from 2001 to 2006. I will have to pursue a broader critique of this documentary at some other point on this blog.
This post more directly concerns another "documentary," more nearly worthy of being placed in parentheses than the former. "The Men Who Built America," is a "docu-drama" from History (formerly "The History Channel"). The series dramatizes the lives of key figures in Gilded Age (1870-1905 or so) American capitalism (e.g. Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, etc.), combining dramatized reenactments of key moments in the lives of these figures with commentary by contemporary American business (e.g. Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, Carly Fiorina), media figures (Jim Cramer of CNBC), and a spattering of business historians. Significantly, the series garnered two Emmy awards in 2013, for "Outstanding Costumes for a Variety Program or a Special" and "Outstanding Sound Editing for Non-fiction Programming (Single or Multi-camera)," and was nominated for three others ("Outstanding Writing for Non-fiction Programming," "Outstanding Documentary or Non-fiction Series," and "Outstanding Cinematography for Non-fiction Programming") I have watched two of four episodes from this series so far, and I have found it entertaining and, possibly, somewhat informative, except that I am not entirely certain where the boundaries of non-fiction and fictional reenactment extend within the dramatizations!
Emphatically, as someone who holds one college degree in history and regards himself, I think somewhat justifiably, as an economic historian, with a particular focus on U.S. labor history (what else do you think would capture the sensibilities of an American Marxist?!), I am slightly at a loss for how this production could have been presented as a valid entry into categories for non-fiction or documentary series by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Not wanting to come off as a leftist academic snob, I do enjoy a certain level of tolerance for dramatic re-orchestration of actual historical events. At some point, however, my tolerance for contortions of actual history, as I know it, gets strained! With this in mind, I wanted to convey a few quick reflections both on the episodes of this series that I have watched so far (and I absolutely plan to enjoy watching the rest and supply further criticism where it's warranted) and on the network that brought this valuable piece of historical revision to the American television audience.
First of all, let me be fair in reiterating the standpoint from which I am viewing "The Men Who Built America." I am an American Marxist with profound interests in the evolution of American labor and organized labor movements in the U.S. In this regard, I cannot approach the history of American labor and, hence, the development of capitalist class processes (i.e. the emergent dominance of modes for the extraction of surplus labor grounded in the exploitation of wage workers in productive/commodity producing industries) with an uncritical viewpoint. In significant ways, the contemporary U.S. and global economies are, in part, products arising from a longer history through which workers, in the U.S. and in other countries, struggled to make better lives for themselves and their families, sometimes in harmony with the long run objectives of capitalists and government legislators, bureaucrats, and jurists, sometimes not. Following Marx and Engels, class struggle may be a continuous component in the development of humankind, but its forms and intensities are constantly in flux. Moreover, no Marxist can rightly approach the historical development of capitalism without some sincere appreciation and awe for the particular ways in which modern industry, from the beginnings of the English Industrial Revolution as early as the late 1600s, has integrated a succession of technological innovations/revolutions into the ways in which human beings produce, exchange, distribute, and consume objects of everyday life, in so doing transforming human existence in both positive and negative ways. To me, there is something both immensely beautiful and incommensurably ugly in the image of the Monongahela Valley near Pittsburgh at the dawn of the Twentieth century, where Carnegie built the penultimate industrial complex for the production of structural steel, incorporating cutting edge late Nineteenth century technology and largely de-skilled, non-union labor.
For Marxist historians and economists, Nineteenth century American capitalism has to both command a sense of awe and an underlying sentiment of disgust and revulsion at the particular means through which capital broke the self-reliant, independent spirit of the American craftsperson to reduce workers to easily replaceable cogs in a technological behemoth. Moreover, any sensitive appraisal of the transformation of global ecology over the history of industrialization has to regard industrial development in the U.S. and other corners of the presently "advanced" industrialized world at the close of the Nineteenth century as the beginnings of an energy hyper-intensive mode of economic development from which we have yet to suffer the full measure of long term effects on our climate. To say that a handful of American monopolistic capitalists, at the heads of monolithic American industrial and financial organizations, "built" America may express a strong (subjective) degree of historical truth, but by the same token we must recognize that the rise of the American industrial capitalist was accomplished against a violent eclipse of numerous American and broadly humanistic values. In these respects, my impressions of any attempt to recount the history of this period in American economic history are bound to reflect my own partisan position as a Marxist historian/economist, attempting to both account for the marvels of American industrialization and the social and ecological catastrophes that these processes engendered.
For all of its attempts to draw a balanced impression of Gilded Age American capitalists, "The Men Who Built America" is a celebration of the great American monopolists, financiers, and breakers of the emergent American labor movement of the Nineteenth century, told from the perspective of the erstwhile contemporary heirs to capitalism victorious. In fact, the opening scenes of the first episode, dramatizing the moments after Lincoln's assassination as a critical moment when the country was on the cusp of a radical transformation, herald the dawn of an age in which political figures were to be eclipsed in stature and relevance by the great private capitalist entrepreneurs, as yet unencumbered in their quest for greatness by the regulatory or welfare state. Notwithstanding periodic apologetics by such gaudy contemporary figures as Mark Cuban on the absence of necessary protections for working people like minimum wage and occupational health and safety laws, there remains an implicit suggestion that America's present wealth, elevated living standards, and sheer entrepreneurial dynamism would never have been possible had this generation of robber barons not been allowed to exercise their unfettered will to power.
As such, I want to make the point that there is nothing wrong with having the high-flying financial and high-tech superstars of American and global capitalism pay tribute to the generation of American monopolists that made possible the economic system in which they could become such big winners by recourse to their own entrepreneurial acumen and business savvy. My big gripes about the series, so far, concern the particular retelling of key moments in, among other things, American labor history. In particular, the series' reenactment of the 1892 strike at Carnegie's Homestead, Pennsylvania steel facility stands out as an inferior fabrication of a much more fascinating, controversial, contentious, and violent episode in American history. In place of even a partial and truncated retelling of the struggle that took place in July of 1892, the account presented in the second episode of the series plays out like an overly dramatized reenactment of the dispersed labor demonstration in pre-World War I Petrograd at the beginning of Doctor Zhivago, with the mounted Cossacks armed with sabres being replaced by dismounted Pinkerton guards armed with Winchester rifles. The assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie Steel's ruthless Chairman, by Russian immigrant and anarchist Alexander Berkman, likewise, bears no resemblance to what actually transpired at the downtown Pittsburgh offices of Carnegie Steel a week after the strikers' battle with the Pinkertons. Similarly, the reenactment of the failed assassination attempt on Frick plays out like some nasty street fight, concluding with a mildly wounded Frick over his would-be assassin, beating him to a bloody pulp!
For the satisfaction of my own obstinate insistence on historical accuracy, a brief account of what the series got wrong would suffice. The strike that began in July 1892 did not result from the death of an overworked factory hand but from an ultimatum on wage cuts by Frick leveled at the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, a craft union of skilled workers (doing jobs at the plant that were on the verge of being phased out through technological innovation) that represented less than a quarter of the Homestead employees. Turning down Frick's demands, the Amalgamated lodges convinced the 3,000 unskilled and semi-skilled workers at Homestead to join them in seizing control of the works and the surrounding town, organizing into virtual military units to set up blockades on incoming roads and rail lines, and setting up a system of pickets along the banks of the Monogahela River to alert the larger community if Carnegie was attempting to bring in strike breakers to restart production at the plant. Frick, who had already secured the services of the Pinkerton Agency, a private police force renowned for roughing up strikers at the behest of industry, planned to send 300 Pinkertons into the plant via two barges departing from McKees' Rocks, west of Pittsburgh on the night of July 5. As the Pinkertons passed Pittsburgh in the early morning hours of July 6, pickets sent the message back to the Amalgamated's Advisory Committee, who sent out the alarm to the entire town that Pinkertons were on the way. By the time the Pinkertons arrived at the river landing outside the works, a crowd of nearly 10,000 locals, armed with rifles, revolvers, clubs, and every other conceivable type of improvised weapon was waiting for them.
In the battle that ensued, 7 Pinkertons and 9 strikers were killed by gun fire and another 70 or so from both sides were wounded. After holding out on their barges for several hours in the July heat, under fire from every direction from the strikers and their local allies who also lobbed sticks of dynamite at the barges and attempted several times to set them on fire, the surviving Pinkertons surrendered and came ashore, only to be force-marched back into town through a gauntlet of angry town folk who rendered every last one a battered and bloodied mess, spared only by the insistence from the Advisory Committee that a massacre would bring an assault by the state militia on the town. To the dismay of the strike committee, the state militia, mobilized by the governor to restore order, marches into town six days later and, without a shot fired, seizes control of the works, allowing Frick to bring in strikebreakers. Afterward, the members of the Advisory Committee were all arrested and brought up on charges of treason against the state of Pennsylvania, for which they were all eventually acquitted.
In the meantime, with Carnegie's control of the plant restored, Frick struggled to staff the facility with needed skilled workers not associated with the Amalgamated. Problems multiplied when other Carnegie facilities in the Pittsburgh area went out on strike in sympathy with the Homestead workers. In the midst of all this, a lone anarchist from New York slips into Pittsburgh, intent on assassinating Frick. At first, Alexander Berkman had intended to blow up Frick with a homemade bomb, but when another bomb that he had made wouldn't detonate, he settled to the idea of shooting Frick with a revolver. Berkman showed up at the offices of Carnegie Steel several times on the week of July 18 claiming to be an employment agent from New York, but he was unable to secure a meeting with the Chairman. Finally, on July 23, before again being sent away, Berkman forces his way into Frick's office and pulls his revolver. Frick, who was in a meeting with Carnegie Steel Vice President John Leishman, gets up from his chair as Berkman enters the room. Berkman, who apparently acquired the notion that Frick might be wearing some sort of bulletproof vest, aims the revolver at Frick's head. Seeing the gun barrel before him, Frick covers his face and turns his head away to the right. The first bullet grazes Frick's left ear, enters his neck and lodges in his right shoulder. Leishman immediately tries to force the gun away from Berkman but is shoved aside and the second bullet fired by Berkman goes through Frick's left shoulder and lodges in his upper back. Trying again to get the gun away from Berkman, Leishman succeeds at forcing Berkman's arm upward so that the third bullet hits the ceiling. At this point, Frick summons enough strength to get up from his seat and tackle Berkman and Leishman, knocking all three men onto the floor. Berkman then draws a dagger, stabbing Frick once in the hip and then in the thigh. A carpenter working in a neighboring office rushes into the room and hits Berkman over the head with his hammer. Berkman shrugs this off and continues to stab at Frick until the carpenter and one other responder finally subdue him. While bloodied, none of Frick's injuries turn out the be life threatening and he is back at work in a week.
Meanwhile, the Amalgamated's Advisory Committee, having been charged by the state with treason, now found itself having to fight off bad press and disavow any connections to lone wolf anarchists, seeking to murder their principal corporate antagonist. If the majority of the Amalgamated's membership regarded themselves as God-fearing, loyal, patriotic American citizens, many must have questioned why their union was suddenly being associated by the press with Godless radical Russian anarchists! Support for the Amalgamated across many quarters of American labor dwindled. The strike at Homestead lasts until November, at which point the Amalgamated concedes defeat. Carnegie Steel, under Frick's leadership, refuses to operate any of its facilities with unionized skilled workers. Within ten years, absent the interference of the Amalgamated, the full integration of Bessemer converters and open hearth furnace technologies in American steel production renders the knowledge of every last one of the remaining skilled workers in the industry obsolete. The modern steel industry, epitomized by Carnegie Steel's greater Pittsburgh complex, is, thus, founded in a struggle of wills between entrepreneurial industrialists, seeking to enable the force of technological change to revolutionize the way steel is produced and, hence, how the world uses steel, and skilled craft workers, seeking to defend an obsolete occupation and the way of life it sustained with no less determination.
I find this history compelling, if for no other reason, because it is real - the events actually happened in this form. Moreover, the battle on July 6 between the Pinkertons and striking steel workers is one of those interesting moments in labor history when workers actually win a battle, even if, in the end, they lost the war. It was a moment characterized by the determination of a community to stand up for its self and for its best interests against the determination of capital to reshape labor relations in the interests of securing more profit for shareholders and executives. At many moments in American labor history, the confrontations between working people and the enforcing arms of capitalism have turned savagely violent. It turns out that government has not been the only potential force standing in the way of entrepreneurial capitalists seeking to revolutionize production over American economic history. Rather, the capital-labor relation is an important component in the larger story of how men like Andrew Carnegie and, later, Henry Ford transformed the way goods are produced and consumed in America. In the end, the steel and automotive industries were both compelled to deal with workers organized to defend their own interests against the unvarnished capacity of capital to have its way in labor relations. Furthermore, the notion that class struggle in the U.S. is somehow a foregone theme, erased by global economic integration/outsourcing and the knowledge economy, constitutes a myth, seeking the appropriate future moment to be proven wrong.
With these thoughts in mind, an account of such key moments in American economic history as the defeat of organized craft labor in steel in the 1890s that fabricates events to paint a broader narrative of the Gilded Age as an exercise of the competing wills of monopoly capitalists, against which American workers were at best a curious passenger along for the ride, skewered by certain unfortunate moments of violence for which the capitalists were ultimately accountable, tends to feel more than a little bit patronizing! The strikers at Homestead were not innocent, overworked, but otherwise passive victims of sadistic figures like Frick and his hired guns. They were men seeking to write a different history in accordance with their collective will, who were equally accountable for the excesses of violence that they actually inflicted in defense of their conceptions of economic citizenship. Real history is a little more complex and, in certain ways, morally ambiguous in its outcomes than fiction.
Closing, the most peculiar thing that I find about this series is that it was developed by a channel called, of all things, History. I can remember before I moved to Northampton, when I was still living with my parents, that, in addition to watching PBS, I spent a lot of time watching cable channels like The History Channel (History's predecessor), the Discovery Channel, Arts & Entertainment (A&E), and the Learning Channel because these networks had all the interesting shows about science, culture, and historical events. In general, they were places where someone as interested as I was about learning actual things about the world could tune in and be enlightened. In the fifteen years or so since then, in the absence of cable, I have spared myself the disappointment of watching these channels degenerate in the wake of reality TV. In place of well produced, well researched documentaries on historical events like the Mongol conquests or the development of modern medicine, History now serves up "Ice Road Truckers," "Pawn Stars," and "Ancient Aliens." If, to this point, "The Men Who Built America" has exceeded some of my expectations as a program from History, it has similarly left me asking "how much of this can I actually count as reality rather than fiction?" Perhaps historical authenticity is not as important a factor when the majority of your programming appeals to an audience that believes in aliens and enjoys watching Las Vegas pawn shop workers haggling over the prices of used merchandise.
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