Animal City: The Domestication of America

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Book:

Animal City: The Domestication of America
Andrew A. Robichaud
Cambridge, Mass. & London, Harvard University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9780674919365; 352pp.; Price: £31.95

Reviewer:

Dr Thomas Almeroth-Williams
University of York

Citation:

Dr Thomas Almeroth-Williams, review of Animal City: The Domestication of America, (review no. 2427)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2427
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

See Author's Response

Late June 2020 was an extraordinary time to be reading Animal City. COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, had already killed around 130,000 people in the United States, with urban areas suffering the highest death rates. In New York City alone, 30,000 people had died. As scientists and the media attempted to pin down an animal source and intermediate host, America’s slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants were emerging as infection hotspots. Meanwhile, anti-racism protesters were taking to the streets of more than 2,000 US towns and cities following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Robichaud could scarcely have imagined a year like 2020 when he was writing this insightful study of nineteenth-century urban life. But Animal City is all the more powerful in the wake of events which expose myriad failings of government, regulation, public health, policing and justice; the far-reaching effects of social inequality; and alarming global developments in human–animal relations.

The author takes us back to a period (c.1850 – 1906) which, he argues, laid the foundations for the world that most Americans now live in, a world in which millions of animals support a way of life out of sight and mind. Within half a century, health and animal welfare reformers restricted the interactions that Americans had with animals to those which they deemed palatable, and they began by targeting urban-dwellers. This process would involve countless failings, missed opportunities, corruption and above all ‘pervasive unintended consequences’ which, Robichaud convincingly argues, Americans continue to live out (p.88).

This book joins a new generation of historical studies of human–animal interactions in the United States, building on William Cronon’s ground-breaking Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991). 2014 brought Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan; 2016 Frederick Brown’s study of Seattle, The City Is More Than Human; and 2019 Joshua Specht’s Red Meat Republic, to name just a few.(1) Robichaud’s particular interests in urban animal nuisance, regulation, and welfare have long been at the forefront of both British and North American animal histories, and the nineteenth century has received considerable attention. Nevertheless, Robichaud delivers something fresh and substantial which should satisfy a wide range of readers, both academic and general.

The book’s central argument is that human health and animal welfare reform went hand in hand with growing alienation from the animals that put food on urban plates. Three of its seven chapters focus on San Francisco’s evolving relationship with livestock. The subtitle, ‘The domestication of America’, might raise expectations that the book covers multiple cities across the country. In fact, Robichaud concentrates on San Francisco and New York City, while making concise but valuable points about several other cities including Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Cincinnati, as well as London, Paris, and Berlin. In a study which already covers extensive physical and thematic ground, I found this approach effective, supported as it is by the author’s care to avoid generalisation. Moreover, while New York’s animal history has received prior attention—Robichaud offers many new insights, not least into the city’s swill dairies in chapter one—San Francisco was crying out for an in-depth survey, which the author skilfully delivers.

Chapter two examines San Francisco’s gradual shift, between 1850 and 1870, from a ‘complaint-based’ reactive system of slaughterhouse regulation to new laws which prejudged these businesses, along with hog ranches, as nuisances (p.72). Robichaud demonstrates that this 20-year “war on butchers”, which culminated in the creation of a suburban slaughterhouse district, Butchertown, brought about an early form of zoning. In the 1850s, cattle droves continued to cause offence and havoc in the streets as the authorities struggled to enforce new slaughterhouse licensing and zoning laws. Facing crippling complaints and fines, shifting boundaries and other uncertainties, some butchers appeared as keen to find a permanent solution as their opponents. In the 1860s, a cluster of intensive slaughterhouses and hog ranches sprang up along Mission Creek, attracting the attention of the city’s new Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), Board of Health, and police. The resulting clean-up campaign, utilising tougher laws and enforcement, just as new railroad lines were being constructed, proved pivotal. After a bitter last stand in 1870, the butchers gave in and moved to the new Butchertown in the tidelands, ‘out of sight and smell of downtown residents’ (p.81).

The unintended consequences of this victory for progress are exposed, to devastating effect, in the next chapter, ‘Blood in the Water’, for me the book’s most significant contribution. San Francisco’s reformers not only wanted to put distance between people and livestock, they sought to alleviate nuisances by exploiting the natural environment in and around Islais Creek. Their grand ambitions quickly unravelled, not least because the tides proved insufficient to wash away the huge quantities of blood and offal that the new stilted slaughterhouses were discharging. Watercress, shrimp, migratory birds and milch cows now marinated in putrid water, with tragic implications for the low-earning men and women who lived off them. To make matters worse, Butchertown’s slatted floors laid the foundations for a future health crisis: San Francisco’s post-earthquake rat infestation and subsequent outbreak of plague.

A more immediate consequence of the public health laws which created Butchertown was the rise of hog ranches attached to, or worse still, beneath kill floors. An 1888 ordinance banned the latter, while further rules demanded that offal fed to hogs must be boiled beforehand. But regulating how firms operated proved even more difficult than controlling where they did so. Health inspectors began to have more success in the 1890s but Robichaud suggests that by reducing the amount of offal fed to pigs, reformers may have unwittingly fuelled an explosion in the city’s rat population. Robichaud’s attentiveness to such regulatory, agricultural, and ecological connections lies at the heart of what makes Animal City such an interesting study. The 1906 earthquake sent Butchertown’s stilted slaughterhouses crashing into the bay and, while some were rebuilt, the site entered a state of terminal decline. Robichaud sums up Butchertown’s bloody history as one of ‘wilful invisibility, neglect, and denial—or worse, out-right desecration. In many ways it was a sacrificial landscape’ (p.126).

Chapter four explores the evolution of animal protection societies, particularly San Francisco’s SPCA. In doing so, Robichaud explores the motivations of those who sought to civilise America’s cities. He gives considerable credit to these reformers for their good intentions and deeds, but demonstrates that their creation of ‘invisible landscapes of animal suffering and death’ was ‘unintentionally counterproductive’ (p.138). The removal of animals and slaughterhouses from San Francisco in the interests of public health soon placed geographical and logistical constraints on the SFSPCA’s ability to enforce animal protection laws. The SFSPCA’s powers fizzled out before they reached the outskirts of the city, and Butchertown. No one knew this better than Captain Henry Burns, the Society’s special agent in the 1870s. Burns would eventually lose his job, ostensibly because his valiant efforts to police the treatment of animals—as they were unloaded from railroad cars and steamships, and driven to Butchertown—were financially unsustainable.

In a sprawling and increasingly segmented system of farming, transporting, and killing animals, individual responsibility and wanton cruelty were too hard to prove and fines almost impossible to extract. It was far simpler to tackle someone mistreating a horse downtown, and this is precisely what the Society opted to do. But efforts to protect equids hit poor workers hardest. While drivers employed by firms usually got away with a warning, Italian vegetable peddlers received hefty fines for working injured horses and mules. The Society brought thousands of prosecutions between 1878 and 1919 but virtually none were against corporations. In the meantime, ‘Out of sight, the abuse of livestock faded from public consciousness’ (p.157).

Robichaud tenaciously exposes the social tensions underlying urban animal regulation in this period. He is commendably and consistently sympathetic to the ‘low-hanging fruit’—the small-scale dairymen, the poorly paid drovers and slaughtermen, the tradesmen employing a single horse, the ragpickers, and others—who repeatedly lost out as a result of health and animal welfare regulations, while the big players evaded enforcement or paid their way out of trouble (p.120). He acknowledges that the 20-year “war on butchers” made life for them frustrating, ‘unpredictable and itinerant’ (p.60); and describes the difficulty and danger of slaughterhouse work. Throughout, the book is impressively alert to the connections between human–animal relations and social inequality. Somewhat disappointingly, however, it very rarely names individual workers or presents their specific actions or words. This may reflect a scarcity of evidence—as Robichaud briefly indicates on a couple of occasions—but perhaps it also stems from a desire to focus on reformers and their agents, all of whom the author brings to life very effectively.

Chapter five takes us back to New York for an original examination of canine labour, specifically dog-powered mills and the pulling of ragpickers’ carts. In the former, reformers perceived unnecessary cruelty, in the latter social degradation. These animals ‘did not fit the emerging ideals of dogs as companions, friends, and pets’ (p.177). The city’s ASPCA (American SPCA) duly went on the offensive and, by 1880, the number of ragpickers’ dogs had fallen sharply. Machine dogs may have been rarer in the city but, as a fascinating legal case involving a cider mill and an animal named Bounce illustrates, they could be even more contentious. In the end, the ‘humane ideal of pet ownership’ won out, but once again there were human casualties (p.195).

The final two chapters turn to animal entertainments. The first focuses on the volatile relationship between ASPCA founder Henry Bergh and the showman P.T. Barnum in the 1860s–80s. Robichaud opens with the stomach-churning spectacle of a boat filled with live bears, bison and other animals being deliberately cast over Niagara Falls in 1827. By contrast, in 1886, as a circus horse was about to walk a tightrope over the Falls, the ASPCA stepped in and shut the event down. Animal entertainment had been ‘cleansed of visible suffering and death’ but, as Robichaud reveals, this process was riddled with controversy, contradiction and deception (p.198). Blatant animal suffering, which risked stirring up harmful human thoughts and feelings, faded from public view but persisted in the shadows, unchecked and excused. Chapter seven examines the development of Woodward’s zoological gardens in San Francisco over roughly the same period. Robichaud reveals how the attraction increasingly monitored and regulated its human visitors, as well as its captive beasts, ‘to create a placid experience’ (p.240). But behind the scenes, the author argues, Woodward’s was not so different from the city’s slaughterhouses and hog ranches. They all relied on animals suffering in far-removed, invisible spaces to supply agreeable goods to civilised city-dwellers.

Animals may be at the heart of Robichaud’s examination of regulatory, environmental, and cultural change, but along the way their physicality and behaviour can fade into the background. I found the book most compelling when the author coaxed these animal actors back into the light, for instance when New York’s feedlot cows were refusing to eat their swill; when we meet Butchertown’s snarling yet selectively companionable dogs; and when he acknowledges the canine intelligence which ragpickers relied on. Throughout, Robichaud meticulously and evocatively describes weather, tides, and habitat, particularly in chapter three, a truly immersive survey of Butchertown’s horrifying environmental impact.

The horse—arguably the most influential quadruped living in nineteenth-century American cities—receives surprisingly little attention in Robichaud’s analysis. This is perhaps because horses were not zoned out of San Francisco or New York, the process which the book is most interested in. The author clearly explains, albeit briefly, that moving livestock out of cities encouraged a rise in horse traffic, that horses transported myriad goods through the streets of San Francisco, and rebuilt the city after the 1906 earthquake. But the book stops short of discussing equine intelligence, behaviour, or interactions with people in detail. This would, I think, have helped to flesh out why horses continued to be deemed essential and acceptable presences downtown while cattle and pigs were not. While Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have offered valuable insights into nineteenth-century American urban horse work, as has Ann Norton Greene, these studies leave plenty more to be said.(2) This seems something of a missed opportunity in what is an otherwise generous study.

Robichaud avoids forcing lessons from history on his readers but offers plenty of food for thought in the midst of a pandemic, environmental crisis, and escalating tensions, both domestic and diplomatic. I was struck, for instance, by the observation that fear of Chinese immigrants spreading infectious diseases was a major impetus for San Francisco establishing its Board of Health in 1865. Three years later, a representative in California’s State Assembly hastily dropped his proposal to extend protection to “Chinamen and Indians” under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (p.132). Much has changed but human and non-human animal lives remain intertwined.

Thoroughly researched, convincingly argued and engagingly written, Animal City offers a great deal to researchers, students, and general readers interested in urban, environmental, or social history. Perhaps most importantly, it encourages us to confront the various forms of human and non-human animal suffering which we continue to force out of sight and mind, with all the unintended consequences that this might entail.

Notes

1. W. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); C. McNeur’s Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, Mass., 2014); F. L. Brown, The City Is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (Seattle and London, 2016); J. Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton, 2019).Back to (1)
2. C. McShane and J. A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 2007); A. Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).Back to (2)

November 2020

Author's Response

Andrew A. Robichaud

Posted: Fri, 13/11/2020 - 

I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Almeroth-Williams for his deep, generous, and engaged reading and review of Animal City. I am pleased to see Animal City  in good company in Almeroth-Williams’s footnotes, and would also add his own recent book, City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London (2019) as a welcome addition to the vibrant and burgeoning field of animal history—specifically urban animal history. As Almeroth-Williams notes (and no doubt understands first hand), animal history poses a variety of challenges to historians in terms of sources, perspectives, and methodologies. These challenges, however, are far outweighed by the wide-ranging insights such histories can offer. When Almeroth-Williams writes that I ‘could scarcely have imagined a year like 2020’ when I wrote Animal City he is perhaps understating the point. Nevertheless, I am grateful to hear that Animal City feels relevant in trying to make sense of these unusual times, as Americans and others continue to grapple with questions of ‘government, regulation, public health, policing and justice; the far-reaching effects of social inequality; and alarming global developments in human–animal relations.’ Thank you for this thoughtful review.

Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948

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Book:

Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948
Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9781526124319; 288pp.; Price: £25.00

Reviewer:

Dr Ewan Gibbs
University of Glasgow

Citation:

Dr Ewan Gibbs, review of Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948, (review no. 2428)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2428
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

Danger, disaster and the loss of life are emblematic features of Britain’s cultural memory of coal mining. Netflix’s hit series, The Crown, prominently reinforced these motifs through its recent portrayal of the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales. Collective traumas arising from major mining disasters and efforts on the part of trade unionists, politicians, and industry officials to improve health and safety conditions have featured prominently in British coal mining’s extensive historiography. Less has been written about the experience of disabled miners and former miners, and their place in coalfield societies. Men disabled through coal mining were a concentrated and visible presence in the early years of the 20th century, when the coal industry reached its peak, employing around one in 10 occupied men. Their conditions were the subject of politicising efforts by trade unions and became enmeshed in both complex tripartite systems of compensation, as well as structures of authority and caregiving in families and communities. Disability in Industrial Britain illuminates a hitherto under-examined history from which we can learn much about industrial society and disability in modern Britain.

Disability in Industrial Britain came out of the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields, 1780-1948’. This cross-institutional project challenged existing accounts of work, community, and welfare during the industrial era. It suggested that disability should be understood as a central animating feature of coalfield societies in England, Scotland, and Wales, rather than a marginal feature or a minority experience. Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin and Steven Thompson’s monograph innovatively examines the history of disability in the coalfields using highly original research and theoretical perspectives. The authors trace the evolution of disablement in the coalfields through the coal mining industry’s technological development, underlining the industrial and political relations through which industrial injuries and occupational health conditions developed. This book’s emphasis on the ‘rather mundane’ elements of the coal industry’s routinised experiences of disability underline one of the authors’ central contentions: Disability was a widespread factor in coalfield lives. Miners and their families lived with disability as a normalised and visible feature of their collective existence. Bohata et al.’s ambition is not limited to illuminating the central role of disability to mining communities. They also interrogate evolving cultural representations of coalfield disability, emphasising the role of miner-writers and poets who developed a ‘unique body of industrial writing’ (p. 7).

By concentrating on the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, this volume incorporates the period when the British coal industry was at its height of employment and production and in terms of its national political importance. These were the years when coal industry employment peaked at over a million men in the run-up to the First World War. Large regional economies became thoroughly dependent on coal mining, and settlements were either thrown up by the industry or expanded greatly under its influence. Miners’ unions became increasingly strong, nationally orientated, and party political over this period. By the early 1920s, county unions were unified in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) which was locked out by mine owners in two titanic industrial disputes in 1921 and 1926. The book starts in 1880 when the Employers Liability Act was passed. Along with the Workmen’s Compensation Act 17 years later, this legislation began to formalise tripartite structures whereby coal owners, the state, and unions arranged compensation for disabled miners. Disability in Industrial Britain ends in 1948, the year in which the National Health Service was established, and the year after Britain’s colliers were nationalised. Focusing on the later years of the private industry illuminates important trends during a period when coal was central to British industry and public life. The time period is concise enough to allow for a meaningfully detailed overview of coal mining’s development, and the contribution of changes in production to experiences of disability. Mechanisation is discussed in terms of the dangers it posed to miners’ limbs but also through the effect that boring processes had in spreading silicosis. These observations are accompanied by reviews of other important factors such as housing, health provision, and the organisation of medical care and compensation for disabled miners.

In the introduction, the authors present their work as a contribution to the emergence of ‘a more radical historiography’ (p. 5). Coalfield history has advanced beyond its traditional focus on institutional accounts of unions, government, and coal mining firms, to incorporate a new emphasis upon gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The voices and experience of disability on the part of miners and of their families deserve to be heard within a more pluralistic social and cultural history. There are significant methodological challenges to achieving this ambitious objective. The growing historiography of the nationalised coal industry has made extensive use of oral testimonies, but these are less abundant for earlier periods and less likely to focus on this volume’s thematic concerns. Some oral testimonies were used in this book, but the emphasis was placed on other sources. Local newspapers and relevant specialist publications, as well as the records of Boards of Poor Law Guardians, courts, trade unions, contributory benefit organisations, coal owners’ associations, and medical institutions are combined very effectively. Their use demonstrates the benefit of writing this volume as a multi-author endeavour within the context of a large project.

A significant volume of manuscript material has been consulted but is also very effectively synthesised. In the book’s opening pages, the stark reality of coalfield disabilities is established through the story of Frank Eaves, a South Wales miner whose regular compensation payments for an accident he experienced in 1906 were rescinded two years later by Judge Roberts, who felt ‘he needed to try harder to overcome his impairment’ (p. 2). These sources also sustain a complex understanding of disability and disablement. Impairment was a common experience, with approaching one in five miners injured to the point of at least temporary impairment each year in the lead-up to the First World War. Miners often worked on through injuries and disabilities; depending on the severity they could be supported by workmates. More seriously injured workers could still be redeployed from the coalface to lower wage and lower status jobs on the surface. Permanent disablement, either through the effects of industrial accident or the crippling onset of occupational illness, led to their complete removal from mining, and often the labour market itself. The assessment of ballads that were sung by begging disabled miners (some translated from Welsh) demonstrates how men in these positions attempted to support themselves economically, and articulated moral arguments about the injustices they had experienced. Ballad singers anticipated the miner-writers of the 20th century. Some had been forced to retire from the industry through disablement and used their literary role to voice their cause.

Britain’s coalfields remained highly varied across the industrial era. By presenting research from three distinct coalfield regions with differentiated geographies, cultures, and traditions, Bohata et al. illuminate a diverse range of disability experiences. The North East of England was Britain’s oldest large coal mining region, whilst South Wales was the largest region by employment and production at the industry’s zenith in 1913, following intense development in the preceding decades. Scotland’s coalfields were a patchwork of different regions that had developed at different points in time, experienced varied fortunes, and faced distinctive markets. Some important trends are brought out in comparative assessments of these regions across Britain. Housing was universally ‘small, crowded and frequently lacking adequate sanitation’ (p. 142), but conditions were especially poor in Scotland, where single-room cottages were more common than elsewhere. Conversely, housing in South Wales tended to be in better condition due to bylaws that acted to limit overcrowding. In the North East of England, the operation of an arbitration committee between unions and management was emblematic of the Durham Miners’ Association’s ‘more consensual politics’, whereas unions in Scotland and Wales were more inclined to adversarial approaches (p. 188). Across Britain, a moral economy of disability, which operated at firm level, tended to give way to formalised approaches to compensation, established by legislation from the late 19th century. Under the earlier regime, managers combined their assessment of injuries with the character of the miner when considering compensatory payments and redeployment to appropriate work for injured men. More detail on this moral economy would have been helpful, especially on whether it was stronger in older coalfields or smaller firms, where paternalism may have been more strongly embedded. In the conclusion there are also indications that the moral economy survived the formalisation of compensation systems from the late 19th century in a diminished form. That corroborates recent research on the nationalised industry which indicates that a strongly-held collective sense of social contract and mutual obligations structured industrial relations in British collieries into the late 20th century. Practices such as mutual support for older miners also continued to survive at workgroup level. Rather than juxtaposing the moral economy with legalistic approaches, it may have been more productive for the authors to trace their overlapping nature.

Rich sources and powerful stories animate this volume. However, there is also a tendency towards hyperbole in assessing the book’s place in coalfield historiography. This is most apparent in criticisms of the institutionalist focus of coal mining history: ‘In none of this labour history is there much attention given to the material circumstances of life for miners or their families, or the more mundane but crucially important work carried out by branch or lodge officials’ (p. 183). Furthermore, historians ‘have not studied labour politics from the viewpoint of individual union members’ (p. 183). Those observations may have been more valid around 20 years ago. In recent years, a more holistic labour history of coal mining has evolved that is concerned with familial experience, shifts in living standards, and daily experiences of health and safety. The work of Scottish coal mining historians who address these themes include Alan Campbell’s two volume history of community formation and workplace politics, which covers approximately the same time period as this volume.(1) Robert Duncan’s highly readable single-volume history emphasises major alterations in labour relations, housing, and family relations, as well as immigration.(2) Jim Phillips’ recent monograph on Scottish miners in the 20th century includes a highly original assessment of the coal industry’s health and safety record, examinations of gender relations, and considerations of the spatial experience of community that is shared in this work.(3)

Campbell and Duncan’s emphasis on ethnicity in the Scottish coalfields only gains limited reciprocation in this book. In the introduction the authors note the difficulty they experienced in tracing direct links between race or ethnicity and coalfield disability experiences. One area where perhaps more development could have been made is in relation to religion. Assessments of the engagement of disabled miners in religious processions and events are made, with the emphasis on dissenting Protestantism in South Wales. Whilst the authors note that suspicion towards Catholicism characterised the Scottish, English, and Welsh coalfields assessed in this book, less consideration is given to whether there was a distinctive Catholic experience of coalfield disability. Significant Catholic diasporas were certainly present in Scotland and the North East of England, including Irish and Eastern European migrants and their descendants. This may be a task for future researchers.

Religious narratives of disability, especially ‘overcoming’ stories, were influential (p. 41). Judge Roberts was not an isolated figure. Assessments of disability based on individual character traits and with strongly Christian overtones never fully dissipated in the time period addressed by this book, and strongly informed the quintessential British coal mining film, How Green Was My Valley (1939). Yet these religious outlooks were challenged. The entire final chapter of the book is given over to an assessment of disability in coalfield literature, which figures heavily in earlier in the book, in examinations of industrial politics and compensation, community, and family experiences of disability. Literature is not merely used to exemplify trends visible elsewhere, it is at the centre of this monograph, alongside extensive archival research. This integration is perhaps the book’s biggest single achievement, and an important example for working-class historians across time periods and subjects. Bohata et al. identify the emergence of the miner-writer as integral to the ‘industrial novel’ (p. 212). In Raymond Williams’ terms, such works are necessarily an ‘insider’ account, and therefore distinct from the paternalistic writing of elite 19th century authors who wrote in response to their horror at the social landscape of an industrialising society (p. 213). Miner-writers developed affective accounts of injury and disability that were products of their embeddedness in coal mining culture. They came to reject overcoming tropes, instead narrating powerful stories of class injustice. Communist influence encouraged the radicalisation of coalfield literature in the interwar period, but it remained characterised by ambiguities, especially the distinction between the potentially powerful collective and the decaying bodies of individual miners. The crest-fallen ‘big hewer’ (p. 147), whose daily routine earned him increased social status but eventually eroded his ability to provide for his family, was a ubiquitous character in coal mining novels. The ‘historicist literary methodology’ of Disability in Industrial Britain is pioneering (p. 9). It anticipates the outcome of other major recent projects on working-class literary studies such as the Piston, Pen and Press project [https://www.pistonpenandpress.org/], which is also researching miners’ fiction writing across a similar time period.

Disability in Industrial Britain is a major contribution to our understanding of the British coalfield when it was at the heart of a leading industrial economy. Bohata et al.’s emphasis on disability as a centrally constitutive part of coalfield life is highly original and forms a logical extension to the evolution of the historiography towards community, embodiment and cultural production. At least three major provocations arise from this volume. Rather than a marginalised minority experience, Bohata et al. convincingly implore us to view disability as a condition that was lived with and widely anticipated in the coalfields. In turn, this observation questions, or at least repositions, the straightforward binary between ‘disabled’ and ‘normalcy’ (p. 221). Miners were ‘temporarily able-bodied’ workers who faced the daily risk of accident and the longer-term danger of occupational diseases (p. 221). They were not powerless victims, however, despite the common positioning of the disabled in social theory and historical writing. Miners’ unions were powerful forces in shaping the governance structures that awarded compensation and they marshalled support within the medical profession. Disability in Industrial Britain provides a methodological example of how archival and literary sources can be used to understand working-class experiences through examining structures of political economy, ‘everyday life’, and their contested cultural representation.

Notes

1. Alan Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874-1939: volume i: Industry, Work and Community (Aldershot, 2000); Alan Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874-1939: volume ii: Trade Unions and Politics (Aldershot, 2000).Back to (1)
2. Robert Duncan, The Mineworkers (Edinburgh, 2005).Back to (2)
3. Jim Phillips, Scottish Mineworkers in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019).Back to (3)

November 2020

Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

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Book:

Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s
Traci Parker
Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781469648668; 328pp.; Price: £48.28

Reviewer:

Dr Katherine Ballantyne
University of Edinburgh

Citation:

Dr Katherine Ballantyne, review of Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, (review no. 2430)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2430
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

Traci Parker’s book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, is an engaging study of the intersections of race, class, gender, labour, and activism in an arguably quintessential 20th-century American space: the department store. Straddling the vast historiographies of civil rights and labour studies, Parker’s study deftly carves out its own place. Parker asserts that ideas of ‘Americanness’, and equality more broadly, can be seen in a different light when viewed through the lens of consumers, workers, labour rights activists, and store owners (p. 21). Parker argues that focusing on department stores as the site of this analysis demonstrates how these stores ‘promoted a racialized democracy even as they inadvertently exposed the blatant contradictions of a Jim Crow society espousing democratic ideals’ (p. 4). African Americans’s campaigns to shop in and utilise facilities in department stores, unlike other sites of desegregation campaigns, were not about simply access, Parker contends. Instead, the negotiations were about a combination of the right to shop in these spaces and a rise in consumerism among the black middle class. There is a vast amount of detail in the book, with often striking examples and engaging images. 

The first chapter sets the scene, describing the early department stores in the United States and detailing the experiences of workers and shoppers alike in these institutions. Chapters two and three cover the rise of the department store movement. Parker presents this as the efforts of African American employees within these companies to secure positions equivalent to their credentials and the efforts of consumers from the black middle class to engage with consumerism. As Parker describes, ‘The world of department stores was arguably one of the most effective sites for providing African Americans with opportunities to simultaneously engage consumption as sites for resistance and liberation’ (p. 12). The fourth chapter contextualises the movement within what Parker argues was a rising ‘modern black middle-class consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s’ (p. 13). In the fifth chapter, Parker analyses the department store movement within the context of the lunch counter sit-ins of the early 1960s, tracing the significant gains made during the period. The sixth and final chapter examines the affirmative action cases at Sears, Roebuck and Co. into the early 1980s, concluding the book’s depiction of the department store movement’s rise and fall.

A major question arising from this book is how ‘place’ affected the activism that occurred – how department stores, labour unions, and workers reacted to policies and pushed for change across various parts of the country. After the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), southern and Sunbelt states passed right-to-work laws, but the act is only briefly mentioned in the book (p. 101 and p. 149). Given the prevalence of labour unions’s activism in this narrative, as well as the significance of ‘region’ to labour history in the United States, this seems an unusual decision. Parker deftly describes the intersection of labour and civil rights historiographies throughout the study, but central to these is the idea of location. Recent scholarship has documented the importance of ‘place’ in civil rights activism in particular.(1) Parker’s argument that the department store movement emerged in the 1930s and ended in the early 1980s complements the idea of a ‘long’ movement, a spirited debate from the civil rights movement’s historiography.(2) In focusing on a longer period of time, however, Parker’s book deemphasises the geographical differences across the national study, a similar critique to that raised of the ‘long’ movement focus.(3)

This is particularly relevant in chapter five, ‘Worker-Consumer Alliances and the Modern Black Middle Class, 1951-1970’, which opens with Parker’s argument that the post-Second World War era was ‘ripe’ for a significant shift in labour politics of retail (p. 149). Carving its own place within the existing historiographies of the labour and mid-century civil rights movement, the chapter opens with a brief overview of the sit-in movement’s association with protests based in lunch counters across the South. This is followed by a section on campaigns for workers’s rights in department stores in Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, North Carolina. While it is perfectly reasonable that not everything related to a topic can be covered in a book (despite one’s best efforts), this was an opportunity to address significant differences between the North and South, not to mention elsewhere in the country. The two particular historiographies within which the chapter situates itself have contended with regionality over the past few decades. Studies have challenged southern exceptionalism, considered the civil rights movement in the North, and so on, and the department store movement that Parker has documented seems perfectly suited to such a comparison. Focusing just on the fifth chapter, what were the differences, if any, between stores in Washington and Charlotte and other cities outside of the South? Does this change when department stores outside of cities are considered? I am thinking particularly here of towns and suburbs where branches of these department stores were located, but where the politics of shopping and hiring varied greatly from the major cities. The rest of the book would have benefitted from further acknowledgement of this geographical variation, if it existed. Including examples from outside the Northeast and Midwest, or even stores such as Belk, from North Carolina, or Dillard’s, from Arkansas, would have added to the strength of Parker’s argument that the department store movement, when viewed nationally, contributes to a greater understanding of this period. It may be that these stores do not have archival collections that were accessible, but some acknowledgement of regional variation would have strengthened the analysis of the department store movement. As well as the importance of geographical location, it is worth considering the influence class had on store locations. Suburban spread is discussed in later chapters, particularly chapters five and six, but more examples of stores outside urban areas like Chicago and New York would strengthen Parker’s analysis. These examples, detailing experiences of working in these stores, consumer experiences of shopping, and labour campaigns, would help to contrast what the department store movement looked like in more rural areas (of course, depending upon source availability). 

As Parker aptly describes, the ‘death of the department store movement’ from the late 1960s on gave rise to larger box chain stores (p. 183). The book mentions Wal-Mart and Kmart as prominent examples in this retail shift, but I wonder if other stores complemented the narrative, or complicated it, particularly those emerging after the early 1980s. For example, where do major bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Borders fit into the department store movement? Does adding them into the analysis shift the focus, or impact the chronology described in the book? Their focus on providing a space for customers to enjoy the products for sale, with comfortable seating, a retail-focused emphasis on functioning as part of the local community, and incorporating coffee shops within their facilities echoes the department store model of the early twentieth century.

In conclusion, Parker’s book on the department store movement is thoroughly-researched, thought-provoking, and engaging. It is a significant contribution to the historiographies of civil rights and labour, and makes a substantial argument for future research in an emerging field: consumerism within the long black freedom struggle.

Notes

1. See especially T.J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008); Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980, ed. J. Theoharis and K. Woodard (New York, 2003); C. Lang, ‘Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies’, Journal of Social History, 47 (2013), 371-400.Back to (1)
2. In particular, see J.D. Hall, ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past’, The Journal of American History, 91 (2005), 1233-63.Back to (2)
3. See especially S.K. Cha-Jua and C. Lang, ‘The “Long Movement” As Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies’, The Journal of African American History, 92 (2007), 269.Back to (3)

    

November 2020

AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

• 

Book:

AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines
edited by: Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780198846666; 448pp.; Price: £55.00

Reviewer:

Dr Leah Henrickson
University of Leeds

Citation:

Dr Leah Henrickson, review of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, (review no. 2433)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2433
Date accessed: 20 August, 2022

‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion. But what is AI, really? How have our expectations of computational capability, and even a robot Armageddon, come to be? Why does it matter how we talk about increasingly sophisticated technology, not just in expository prose, but also in fiction? How might visual and cinematic representations of AI technologies reflect and contribute to particular understandings and potentialities? AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines is an ambitious effort to prompt widespread critical consideration not of AI itself, but of the stories—particularly fictional stories—surrounding this pervasive but still largely misunderstood technology. Comprising 16 chapters by scholars from various disciplines, AI Narratives offers a panoramic snapshot of a land still largely unexplored: AI humanities.

Given the relative newness of AI as a term, though, the editors of AI Narratives have opted for the more inclusive ‘intelligent machines’. Recognising the range of terms used to refer to such machines (automaton, android, robot, and cyborg), they explain that ‘[t]he chapters in this book engage with AI in its broadest sense, one that encompasses all of the aforementioned terms: that is, any machine that is imagined as intelligent’ (p. 4). The editors further specify an Anglophone Western scope, and divide the collection into two parts: ‘Antiquity to Modernity’, with each chapter focusing on an era; and ‘Modern and Contemporary’, with each chapter focusing on a theme. Both parts question, commend, and criticise portrayals and explanations of AI. ‘The work of this book contributes to establishing the importance of narratives as constituent parts of any sociotechnical imaginary,’ the editors write. ‘Narratives of intelligent machines matter because they form the backdrop against which AI systems are being developed, and against which these developments are interpreted and assessed’ (p. 7). Despite widespread societal concerns about AI technologies, the editors are optimistic that, through conscious consideration and adjustment of AI narratives, we will progress towards affirmative integration of AI technologies into everyday life.

It is this optimism that drives the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, with which two of the editors are affiliated. Indeed, this collection has emerged from the AI Narratives project workshops jointly led by the Centre and the UK’s Royal Society. These workshops also resulted in a pamphlet about Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter, published by The Royal Society in 2018.(1) Those seeking further analysis of representations of AI may benefit from reading other publications stemming from the Centre.

AI Narratives begins with antiquity, as Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas examine the intelligent machines in the Homeric epics (Chapter 1). Many of these examples are weak, both in the sense that they could be categorised as weak AI and that their intelligence is largely implied. However, Liveley and Thomas’ analysis of the Phaeacians’ self-sailing ships (Odyssey) in particular illustrates the hierarchies of cognitive ability that continue to distinguish human and machine. The ships, after all, are ‘programmed by the knowledge and intelligence found in human minds (noos/noemata). […] The ships’ “independent” thinking and “independent” movement is limited by their human programmers and users’ (p. 35). The use of ‘programmed’ here is admittedly anachronistic, but such language reinforces the relevance of Homeric epics in framing AIs as tools under human control. Even in Homer’s strongest ‘embodied AI’—identified as the amphipoloi of the Iliad—the machines are portrayed as servants of sorts, existing solely to assist their masters. ‘Already in antiquity, then, automata and intelligent machines were conceived as artificial slaves, occupying a special social status no less than ontological category: above that of an inanimate tool—an oar, say; but below that of a human,’ Liveley and Thomas aver (p. 41).

E.R. Truitt elaborates upon the slave argument in her chapter about AI in works of the Latin Middle Ages (Chapter 2), focusing on the representation of early AIs as means for maintaining existing social hierarchies. ‘The desire to use artificial intelligence to spy, to police boundaries and populations, and to act as slaves in the service of power appears equally in the medieval period and in the now,’ Truitt observes. ‘[S]o what does that tell us about now?’ (p. 66) The understanding of AIs as slaves – or, when considered more positively, powerful or even superhuman servants – pervades the history of AI presented in this collection. In her chapter (Chapter 8), Kanta Dihal makes direct connections between narratives of AI and narratives of slavery, delving into the grey area between personhood and thinghood to argue that AI may justifiably resist enslavement. Ultimately, through Dihal’s chapter, ‘we see that the AI uprising narrative is not about the technology itself, and certainly not about the current state of the technology. Instead, these narratives reflect much older accounts of intelligent people being used as tools’ (p. 208). Other chapters elaborate upon the varying potential levels of control that AIs may exert over their human makers (Chapter 9), and even ponder whether distinctions between humans and machines actually matter (Chapter 10). Kate Devlin and Oliva Belton assert in their chapter (Chapter 15), though, that sometimes these distinctions are not so clear. Through an analysis of gynoids and sex robots, Devlin and Belton show how fictional representations of ‘female’ robots and real-world technological development have perpetuated harmfully narrow expectations of womanhood.

Fictional representations of AI transcend genres, but in her chapter (Chapter 12) Anna McFarlane looks to cyberpunk ‘no longer simply as a genre of science fiction, but as a mode that provides an avenue for representing and interrogating the role of algorithms and the power of data over our lives’ (p. 285). Indeed, as McFarlane observes, ‘[r]ather than aiming to predict the future, cyberpunk diagnoses the state of technology in the present, arguing that we are already cyborgs, components in a system that we cannot completely understand’ (p. 291). To repurpose the words of Julie Park (Chapter 5), AI has long seeped through ‘the porous boundary between popular and intellectual culture’ (p. 136), being the subject of overt public spectacle, as well more implicit deception. Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton’s chapter about a device reputedly created by medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus (Chapter 3) further shows how AI may between mechanics and magic. Those ‘components in a system that we cannot completely understand’ may be justified through comparison to more familiar—or familial—circumstances (Chapter 11), or they may simply be accepted as technological feats. These feats, however, do not necessary change the proverbial game. AI is, Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon argue (Chapter 14), simply another player in social games, governance, and life in general.

AI Narratives introduces readers to numerous fictionalised accounts of seemingly intelligent machines, and offers rich analyses of these accounts as they may pertain to nonfictional technological and social developments. The collection reviews the very real fictional histories of AI, drawing attention to the ways in which the expository and aesthetic may come together to instil different understandings of mechanical capacity in different publics. All of the book’s chapters address the use of AI to establish and maintain power, whether human or robotic. When considered together, the chapters constitute a pointed argument for a necessarily historical and literary study of technology to meaningfully question and counteract hegemonic norms.

From Aristotle to Alexa, intelligent machines have long been the subject of human imagination, and this collection provides much-needed historical insight into representations of AI that have informed modern perceptions. Yet imagined applications and implications of intelligent machines actually appear to have changed little over time, and AI Narratives may have been enhanced with more inter-chapter citation to stress the transhistorical nature of themes addressed and avoid repetition of particular examples (e.g. Blade Runner). The collection may too have been enhanced with greater attention to nonfiction narratives. In his chapter (Chapter 13), Stephen Cave examines the narrative devices of works of speculative nonfiction, arguing that these elements have helped the concept of ‘mind uploading’ gain public traction and support. In contrast, Cave observes, works of fiction have served as spaces of critical imagination ‘through narratives that are more nuanced and multisided than those of the proselytizers’ (p. 329). While the focus of AI Narratives is described in the Introduction as being on the fictional, ‘imaginative thinking’ is by no means limited to the realms of fiction, and is it hardly contentious to recognise the bilateral conference between the real and imagined. The book’s narrowed scope prevents digression, but it also inspires future research into the gaps that it adroitly leaps over.

Another such gap is the possible distinction between human and machine intelligence. Although some chapters allude to the unique potential of AI’s cognitive and physical exploits, AIs are always measured against human counterparts. In his comparison of Renaissance AIs to those of our modern day (Chapter 4), for example, Kevin LaGrandeur concludes that ‘[u]ltimately, superhuman slaves—and our worries about them—reflect an archetypal need to supersede our natural limits by whatever ingenious means, even if by developing super-powerful artificial servants we threaten the very dominion we seek’ (p. 114). Yet as Paul March-Russell concludes in his discussion about robot consciousness (Chapter 7), ‘[m]achine consciousness as something separate and distinct from the human gaze (an often white, male gaze) remains, like the figure of Hadaly [from Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve], mysterious and unexplored’ (p. 184). Megan Ward (Chapter 6) gingerly attempts such an exploration. Reviewing arguments for and against computational creativity, she writes that ‘[o]n both sides, machine creativity is being defined against human creativity, whether through imitation, evaluation, or even attempts at machine independence altogether. […] Victorian fictions of originality offer a form of creativity not directly traceable either to machine or human but to their symbiosis’ (p. 157). Ward suggests that computational creativity is not—and need not be—equivalent to human creativity, but might instead be distinct, and might further contribute to new processes and outputs that could be deemed creative. Ward’s chapter ends with the declaration that ‘[i]n order to become creative, machines need not necessarily be more like humans; rather, humans could recognize the creative capacities inherent in mechanicity’ (p. 159). For this to be would require adjustments to modern conceptions of creativity, but Ward’s insight into Victorian conceptions shows the malleability of the term, as well as the possibility of a sort of mechanical autonomy. However, nowhere in AI Narratives is intellectual autonomy of machines sufficiently addressed. In this way, while AI Narratives presents original research, its analyses largely restate what is already widely accepted: intelligent machines may be superhuman, slaves, or superhuman slaves, but their existence and value remains dependent upon human control. For a book about imaginative thinking, these analyses—however insightful—are perhaps not as imaginative as one would expect.

In the book’s final chapter (Chapter 16), Gabriel Recchia applies digital humanities techniques to identify key characteristics of current AI narratives in screen media from the Anglophone West. Recchia emphasises the prevalence of the word ‘control’ in references to AI, confirming that many uses correspond to fears of both humans and AIs losing control. But, Recchia notes, how AI agents may lose control in reality differs from lost control on screen. The former sees AI optimising its programmed instructions by, for example, lobbing a pancake to keep it in the air as long as possible, while the latter sees circuits gone haywire and robotic rebellion. ‘While the “evil overlord” theme may strike some as a legitimate real-world concern as the purposes that corporations and states put AI to come under greater scrutiny, it somehow seems a shame that real failure modes of AI systems are not better represented,’ Recchia concludes. ‘By inflating implausible fears […] and missing genuine risks […], many popular depictions of AI miss opportunities for creative storylines that are more in line with reality, and which will increasingly resonate with audiences as AI systems become increasingly integrated into everyday life’ (pp. 404-405). And so AI Narratives concludes: not with a roboapocalypse, but with a hopeful plea for recognition of the almost unbelievable current state of the art.

AI Narratives triumphantly paves the way for future work in AI humanities. Individual chapters—all balancing historical context with sharp analysis—would make valuable additions to relevant module syllabi, and the volume would be of certain advantage to any reader seeking a fresh and substantiated approach to AI scholarship. This History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines is only a first glance into this kaleidoscopic field of study, but it positions future researchers well for imaginative thinking about their own perceptions.  

Notes

1. Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter (London, 2018). <https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/ai-narratives>Back to (1)

December 2020