Exploding Planetary Cores, Hershey’s Kisses, and Eating Shit

I am writing the parts of my summer travelblogue out of order, it seems, but so what?  I’m a Time Traveler.  I can take in the French and Indian War and dead 18^th century generals AND revolutionary 20^th century architecture in the same morning, no problem.  Yesterday, for instance, just tooling around the Middletown/Harrisburg/Hershey area, I yo-yo-ed back and forth over the centuries willy-nilly, from strolling the mid-19^th century waterfront of Pennsylvania’s current capital, Harrisburg*, on the Susquehanna River, then exploring a turn-of-the-century company town (Hershey), on to a quick gander at Three Mile Island, site of the 1979 nuclear power plant disaster, and, finally, trying to decipher the epitaphs on the tombstones of people who lived most of their lives in the 18^th century.  So I can certainly write out of sequence if I damn-well please.  Besides, I can always go back and rearrange them later…

Incidentally, much like the site of GW’s early debacles that I happened upon the other day, the whole Three Mile Island thing came as a bit of serendipity.  I had forgotten where this incident had taken place and so it hadn’t figured in my (albeit vague) plans for visiting this area until my hosts reminded me of its proximity.  Anyone who was in the US at the time and at all cognizant will instantly recognize the distinctive shapes of those four squat towers with their plumes of white steam wafting up from their maws, like toxic industrial volcanoes rising menacingly from the middle of the broad Susquehanna. 

I was 14 at the time and have a distinct memory of television footage of Jimmy Carter touring the site in order to reassure the nation that folks with the know-how knew how to fix this, the world’s first major nuclear oops.  After all, this was a guy who had helped run a nuclear powered submarine…  Of course, the fact that he was wearing plastic booties even in the power plant control room belied his attempt to soothe a jittery populace.  It also didn’t help that a mere three months earlier the hit disaster movie of the season, the China Syndrome, had been released, in which Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas did their level best to scare the bejeezus out of us with a nuclear-meltdown-explodes-the-earth’s-core scenario.  And I imagine, though I have no special recollection of this, that President Carter’s awful suit must’ve jangled a few already strained nerves:

Booties and Bad Suit

But, just as with so much of what I seem to be doing and seeing on this trip, I hadn’t planned on writing about Three Mile Island in this post.  I had intended, instead, to finally plunge into writing about the first stop in my peregrinations, on Marblehead Peninsula in Lake Erie opposite Sandusky, Ohio.  However, I am getting pretty good at simply allowing things to happen on this trip, at accepting and embracing diversions and detours.  The key is to have an overall plan but not to plan too much, and to allow plenty of time to get lost.  Oh yes, and to strap in and avoid whiplash as you jump from century to century; time travel can be jolting on occasion. 

So, rather than writing about my visit to the archaeological dig at the POW camp on Johnson Island, I shall shelve that for the time being and instead take a moment to reflect on Hershey’s Kisses. 

Anybody who is conversant with late 19^th century robber baron capitalism will be familiar with the (to us) bizarre and cautionary tale of Pullman Town south of Chicago.  Pullman was a company town on steroids – George Pullman didn’t just own the factory making his eponymous railroad sleeper cars.  He owned the houses his workers lived in, the stores they shopped in, the churches they worshipped in (as well as the ministers); he even owned the human waste that came out of his workers.  When you took a dump in a Pullman house, you ended up fertilizing the Pullman gardens from which much of your vegetables came from. 

There is something to be said for this sort of paternalistic capitalism.  Job security, decent housing, trolleys that run on time and so forth.  Good vegetables….  However, Pullman’s edifice came crashing down during the economic panic of the early 1890s.  With industry sucking wind – including the production of luxury sleeping cars – Pullman slashed wages in 1894.  Bad enough, but when he simultaneously raised rents on his workers, they naturally went on strike, inaugurating one of the most violent and contentious labor struggles of that strife-prone era.  It turned into a national general strike (does anyone even know what that means anymore?) crippling the nation’s rail system.  Pullman, over the head of Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld (my favorite Illinois Governor), got President Cleveland to send in Federal troops to quash the strike, but that was the effective end of paternalistic capitalism in America.

Or was it?  I learned this week that the company town has been alive and kicking all this time in Hershey, Pennsylvania.  My hosts, driving me around this thoroughly surreal town, informed me that even if you own your own house in Hershey, the company still owns the land underneath it.  Your children go to Hershey-subsidized public schools, and check out books from the Hershey Library.  You can to this day still go to the Hershey Theater for cultural events, and for fun go to Hershey Park and ride roller-coasters and tilt-a-whirls and eat…cotton candy?  Nah, no doubt you treat your kids to (yet more) Hershey Bars in Hershey Park.  There is an extravagant Italianate pile of a Hotel Hershey overlooking the town where the old man in his dotage would sit on the veranda and gaze upon his factories.  The family established a rambling boarding school for underprivileged youth called, needless to say, the Hershey School (my hostess taught there for upwards of a decade).  The lampposts are in the shape of – what else? – Hershey’s Kisses!  The main drag is, of course Chocolate Avenue, and one winces to contemplate the potential scatological jokes had the Hershey’s gone so far as to recycle their workers’ effluence as Pullman once did.

Again, however, when you factor in good wages from now-unionized jobs, a stable school system, a decent public transit system (subsidized by the Hershey’s, of course), there is some good to be said for this seemingly quaint throw-back to the 19^th century.  And it survived – indeed, seemingly thrived – until very recently.

The Hotel Hershey.  Or, rather, one wing of the Hotel Hershey.

Then about ten years ago, according to my hosts, the Hershey company belatedly discovered out-sourcing.  Chocolate began to be made in Mexico and shipped to Hershey to be boxed and shipped.  The management of the Reese’s plant was split off and a Texas-based management company got the bid, so folks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, make Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces under the baleful, and entirely union-antagonistic, supervision of Texans flown in for the purpose.  My hosts’ 24-year-old son, just back from earning his MA in Comparative European Politics in Denmark, is working a summer job there for $10 an hour, a job that until recently would’ve been a union job with benefits and a real salary.  (David, the son, is also volunteering for the Obama-Biden campaign and working for an up-and-coming Democratic candidate for the statehouse.  David's man, Osman Kamara, is a refugee from the civil wars in Sierra Leone back in the early '90's who has a story to tell that could remind Americans of the reasons this country even exists in the first place.  His big issue is public education.)

I wonder how long it will take for the workers of Hershey to rediscover the power of the labor strike.  Alas, probably never.  Unlike Pullman Town, which went out quite literally with a bang (well, lots of bangs from Federal troops), Hershey will probably go quietly into that dark night of “right to work” capitalism, where the only moral responsibility of management is to make the biggest quick buck in the cheapest way possible.  And if you have to raise the workers’ rent while taking away their union wages and benefits and sending their jobs to Mexico or Taiwan or Singapore or Malaysia to be performed by near-slave labor, that is called progress.

At least they aren’t forced to eat their own shit.

______________

*Philadelphia gave way to Lancaster in 1799, which in turn gave way to Harrisburg in 1812