Culture, Class, and Unnatural Disasters in 1910s and 1920s North America

Abstract

Culture, Class, and Unnatural Disasters in 1910s and 1920s North America Marian Moser Jones (bio) Jacob A. C. Remes. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xi + 199 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Susan Scott Parrish. The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. xi + 295 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. These days nearly every news image of a flood-drowned neighborhood or a storm pinwheeling furiously toward a coastline is accompanied by commentary about human-induced climate change. Yet we still tend to view disasters as something outside of ourselves. The traditional concept of disasters as "Acts of God" has been overlaid by the modernist construct of disasters as objective meteorological, geological, or technological events that can be mitigated rationally through better scientific and social engineering, whether it is better warning systems or more clear-cut response protocols. Two new works remind us how these tensions—between the modernist disaster construct and the reality of modern disasters as inescapably political, cultural, and social phenomena—originated in the early twentieth century. These works, Jacob A. C. Remes's Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era and Susan Scott Parrish's The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History, offer analyses of the 1914 Salem, Massachusetts fire, the 1917 munitions explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the 1927 Mississippi Flood. The authors use these case studies to illustrate how disasters can transcend and reshape the ordinary politics of region and nation, alter the cultural fabric, and permanently reconfigure the relationship between citizens and the state. While each work stands on its own, together Remes and Parrish provide a damning critique of the modernist disaster construct. Just as current-day experts apply a "solutionist" framework to disaster, in which they seek "technical and engineering solutions to social and political problems," sociologists of the 1920s and '30s, Remes writes, took a similar problem-solving approach to disaster (p. 199). As Parrish notes, they believed disasters actually improved [End Page 619] society by "getting problems quickly out in the open to be solved" (p. 19). This conviction stemmed from the Progressive Era idea that disasters provided opportunities for professional experts such as social workers, government reformers and philanthropic businessmen to reorganize society to become more efficient and productive—an assumption that Remes undercuts with his biting analysis of the stingy and invasive actions of social workers in Salem and Halifax. The problem-solving disaster construct also owes much to once-prevalent scientific dogma that nature was moving toward ever-greater levels of equilibrium. Social scientists borrowed from this dogma and came to regard disasters as opportunities for society to reorganize itself and attain a state of greater stability. But the 1927 flood, in which the Mississippi River, after an unusually wet winter, burst through the system of levees designed to contain it, "suggested that nature's unpredictability could not be engineered into placidity," Parrish states (p. 19). Furthermore, the flood forced half a million African-American sharecroppers into squalid, segregated refugee camps, and failed to produce the type of social improvements sociologists envisioned. Instead, Parrish concludes, it demonstrated "that catastrophe was the abiding, everyday reality of Jim Crow" (p. 19). Remes confines his study to two events he characterizes as "working class" disasters, because they overwhelmingly affected wage laborers and their families. The 1914 Salem, Massachusetts fire, which started in a patent leather factory, destroyed over 3,000 homes and 50 factories, and left much of the working-class population homeless and jobless. The December 1917 Halifax explosion resulted when a ship carrying munitions for the Allied Armies in World War I collided with another ship. The blast—the largest man-made explosion prior to Hiroshima—blew through the working-class neighborhoods that adjoined the harbor, flattening houses and sending "shards of windowglass flying like daggers," Remes writes (p. 22). Over 2,000 people died that day, 9,000 were injured and 25,000 lost their homes. In both cases, Remes shows how families, neighbors, and community members helped care for and shelter those injured or rendered homeless, and helped...