Erik Loomis

Jonathan M. Katz @katzonearth.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 29, 2024 at 03:18 UTC

I was shorthanding there. There’s a lot more to say in my book. I don’t think TR was a fascist president, but he had proto-fascist tendencies on the international scale (including overseeing the creation of concentration camps) and was a dyed-in-the-wool eugenicist.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 24, 2024 at 02:13 UTC

My employer is going to this incentive based budgeting ridiculousness and I learned a lot here about where that came from and what it means. Great piece.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 05, 2024 at 23:08 UTC

To every historian who is at the AHA: I am in Spain for two weeks.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 05, 2024 at 05:33 UTC

I'm going to see a bunch of Goya today and this pretty much sums up my state of mind right now

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 05, 2024 at 05:31 UTC

It's 4 AM in Spain and I am truly loving the jet lag

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:48 UTC

Back tomorrow for a thread on labor activism in the Japanese concentration camps, which is what we absolutely should call our Nazi-esque imprisoning people based upon their race in World War II.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:47 UTC

I borrowed some from the excellent Encyclopedia of Arkansas for this thread.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:47 UTC

This would start a widespread migration of both white and black (who were already escaping Jim Crow) out of the South and into the cities of the North and West in the late 1930s and on through and after World War II.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:47 UTC

Between the growth of agribusiness and mechanization, there just wasn’t much ability for people to stay on the farms anymore.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:47 UTC

The Dust Bowl is the most famous problem these people faced in the Great Depression, but it was really the New Deal agricultural centralization practices that began with the Agricultural Adjustment Act that really threw people like the fictional Joads off their land.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:46 UTC

While the drought in Arkansas abated in 1931, the problems of rural workers really did not.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:46 UTC

He works a lot of outrage through his aw-shucks persona and you can watch him slowly get to the point that there is no reason anyone should be going hungry in this nation.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:46 UTC

This 1931 Rogers speech you can watch is really quite fascinating.

www.c-span.org/video/?16592...

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:45 UTC

This was also the last time that Rogers did a major tour of his home state before his 1935 death in a plane crash and this tour is fondly remembered by the people of Oklahoma as well. Rogers was long concerned about economic questions and poverty.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:45 UTC

In 18 days, Rogers traveled through Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to raise money for drought relief. All the money raised was to go to the Red Cross. He raised $3 million in that effort.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:45 UTC

Rogers decided then to raise money on his own and he stopped in England to kick off this effort. While there, he met with the farmers involved, with the merchants, and with the mayor, who was sympathetic to the nearby starving farmers throughout this whole process.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

On January 23, Will Rogers came to town. The legendary humorist and writer from Oklahoma knew this area. He wanted to help. He had personally appealed to Hoover for food relief, but the president was as indifferent to the suffering as before. So that went nowhere.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

The governor, Henry Parnell, had been indifferent to the needs of the farmers before this, now he had to retract his statements that there was no crisis. Senator Joe T. Robinson pushed harder for a federal hunger relief bill.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

This small story got picked up by newspapers. It was called a “riot,” which is massively overblown language for what happened there. What it did do is force Arkansas politicians to do something about it.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

The town’s merchants, threatened with a food riot, just gave away all they had to forestall violence.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

They walked up to the Red Cross office and demanded promised food relief. The Red Cross was not ready for this yet and did not have the needed paperwork. Something like paperwork did not matter to starving tenant farmers.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

With the Red Cross just starting to show an interest, Lokey loaded up his truck with some neighbors and went to the nearby town of England, southeast of Little Rock, to demand relief. Their number quickly to about 50 farmers and some reports said 300-500 people in total, many from the town.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

On January 3, 1931, a tenant farmer named H.C. Lokey was paid a visit by a neighbor, who told him flat out that she could not feed her children

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:44 UTC

The Red Cross got involved to some extent, but things were pretty bad as 1930 turned into 1931. By November, both pellagra and typhoid were on the rise.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:43 UTC

The state government wasn’t much more helpful, in part because the landowners on the Mississippi Delta didn’t want their tenants getting relief that might convince them not to work.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:43 UTC

Naturally enough, he refused, as for him, state-run relief just created welfare dependency. And as Hoover, who certainly knew famine from his food relief days in Europe, noted, the people of Arkansas weren’t actually suffering too much yet. So much for preventive action.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:43 UTC

People didn’t grow enough food there anyway, being part of the cotton culture that dominated the region and it was clear by the end of the year that it would not be able to feed itself. Arkansas’ senators went to Herbert Hoover and asked for drought relief.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:43 UTC

In 1930, Arkansas suffered a severe drought, the worst in the state’s history to that time. The state was devastated.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 03, 2024 at 15:43 UTC

This Day in Labor History: January 3, 1931. Farmers converged on England, Arkansas to demand poverty relief. This led to Will Rogers’ poverty tour and a greater national conversation about conditions in rural America in the early years of the Great Depression!

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:23 UTC

Back tomorrow with a discussion of the farmers movement in Arkansas in the Great Depression.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

Alas, Upshur County, where Sago is located, voted 76-22 for Donald Trump in 2020, even after Wilbur Ross and Elaine Chao helped another administration create an atmosphere of utter indifference for worker rights.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

On a national scale, one would hope that such indifference at the political level from a Republican presidency would lead to workers turning their backs on Republicans entirely and instead voting in people who would care about whether workers live or die.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

In the aftermath of all this, the MSHA engaged in some minor rule changes to supposedly help miners escape after a disaster. But as the Upper Big Branch disaster would show in 2010, working underground in companies owned by people utterly indifferent to human life would be murderous for workers.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

Chao had already excluded mine safety inspectors notes from any FOIA request. That was eventually reversed after the tragedy, but nothing about that brought back 12 dead men.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

A judge finally let the union in on the proceedings. It turned out that the MSHA was ignoring FOIA requirements and no one had been able to get information from the agency in a year.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:22 UTC

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Mitch McConnell, was fully dedicated to making sure that companies did not have to acquiesce to a voice for labor. The company protested when the UMWA fought to have a role in the safety investigation.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

A mere two months later, still without knowledge as to why the explosion happened, the mine reopened. Any further investigations after that point effectively ended. The whole process of investigation was botched from the beginning. The Bush administration basically didn’t care.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

All of the state’s big politicians came out for the funeral: Joe Manchin, Robert Byrd, Shelly Moore Capito, Jay Rockefeller. But the investigation into what happened was pretty weak. The actual cause was never discovered.

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

....As my trapped co-workers lost consciousness one by one, the room grew still and I continued to sit and wait, unable to do much else. I have no idea how much time went by before I also passed out from the gas and smoke, awaiting rescue.”

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

.....The last person I remember speaking to was Jackie Weaver, who reassured me that if it were our time to go, then God’s will would be fulfilled.....

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

...“Some drifted off into what appeared to be a deep sleep, and one person sitting near me collapsed and fell off his bucket, not moving. It was clear that there was nothing I could do to help him....

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

He did eventually mostly recover, but still suffered some long-term weakness and hearing problems. He did however remember what happened and the aftermath. He later stated....

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Erik Loomis @erikloomis.bsky.social [ View ] Jan 02, 2024 at 16:20 UTC

The one survivor, a 26 year old miner named Randal McCloy, was in a coma for the next three weeks, suffering everything from carbon monoxide poisoning and a collapsed lung to a failing liver and edema.

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