The Hamlet Fire

Starred review from July 31, 2017
Cheap food comes at a significant cost, writes Simon (Everything but the Coffee), professor of history at Temple University, in this multidimensional volume about a fatal 1991 fire at a chicken processing plant in North Carolina. At Imperial Food Products in the quiet town of Hamlet, 25 people died after a “hose came loose and launched into a wild dance, spewing flammable oil-based Chevron 32 hydraulic fluid in every direction.” A blaze erupted in the building, which lacked functioning fire sprinklers. Simon describes Hamlet as a town whose fortunes had shifted as factory jobs became scarce throughout the rural South and low-skilled workers became easily replaceable. Imperial owners Emmett and Brad Roe, whose business was “mostly cheap food,” and other similarly negligent employers benefited from lax government oversight, particularly of labor regulations. Though criminal charges and civil lawsuits were later filed, litigation could never erase the trauma that families and survivors endured, as Simon makes clear. He connects the disaster in Hamlet to increasing consumer demand for cheap goods and cites disasters in other industries also driven by low prices. The Hamlet tragedy was not an isolated incident, Simon reminds readers, but part of a wider system of profit-driven labor exploitation.

July 15, 2017
The disheartening but well-told account of a grisly 1991 factory fire that exemplifies the social costs of institutional racism and "cheap" capitalism.Simon (History/Temple Univ.; Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, 2009, etc.) uses the forgotten flashpoint of the Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, North Carolina, in which 25 people died, to synthesize an unsettling argument about an insidious "social gospel of cheap" that has overtaken American life since the economic jolts of the 1970s. "This was a serious, and perhaps purposeful, side effect of the business-first policies that had flipped the New Deal and Fordism on their heads," he writes. In Hamlet, a relentlessly pro-business attitude allowed the factory to maintain an unsafe, grueling workplace for people with few prospects; the fire victims included African-American single mothers and white working-class people whose own prospects had diminished with the disappearance of stable railroad and industrial jobs. Simon incorporates a broader regional history that reveals how such towns became dependent on the "brutally competitive business...of fast food products." He illustrates this with a stomach-churning narrative of the historical transformation of chicken into a cheaply produced, unhealthy foodstuff, farmed out to individual contractors treated like sharecroppers and middlemen like Imperial with little oversight. These processes were accelerated by the revived Southern antipathy toward unions and long-running racial tensions; during the blaze, a black township's fire department was kept on standby, confirming a sense of racial bitterness layered on top of class stratification. "Hamlet's racial geography only added to the already festering distrust that, in turn, exacerbated PTSD symptoms," writes Simon. Despite the temporal distance, Simon creates in-depth characterizations, ranging from Imperial's owners, portrayed as callous out-of-towners who kept factory doors locked to reduce theft, to compromised local officials to desperate workers who barely survived. He conveys this sad tale via admirable research and a clear voice that only occasionally becomes didactic. A vivid, highly disturbing narrative with relevance to current discussions of economic inequality and workplace safety.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2017
Simon, professor of history at Temple University, uses the horrific event of a devastating accident at a chicken-processing plant in rural North Carolina to examine the consequences of the modern American convenience diet, where everything is expendable. Numerous interviews with survivors put the reader at the scene, and Simon incorporates the works of many other scholars to place the Imperial Food Products factory directly into the larger economic and social landscapewhere relentless cost cutting provides low-wage workers with inexpensive food laden with fat, sugar, and salt. Simon discusses the ideology of cheap as a return to the Gilded Age, where dangerous and fatal working conditions, low wages, and government indifference produced the Triangle Shirtwaist fire 80 years earlier. This is not a happy story, nor does it have a happy ending in the way outrage at the Triangle fire helped spark the New Deal, but it is engaging and humanizing. In a time in which so much cruelty is tolerated, this book will be a strong addition to any history or social sciences collection, and well worth the reader's time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)