Retelling US history

images: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (from Jill Lepore, These Truths)

People who mostly learned American history through their high school education have a limited view of the topic. It was a view that paid little attention to the concrete social issues of race, gender, or class in American history. Fortunately there is now a very good way of updating our understandings of the history of our country that rebalances our knowledge of the past. Jill Lepore's outstanding 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States provides crucial reading in these troubled times where racism, nationalism, and sexism are proclaimed at the very top of our government. (The book is also available as an audiobook, read by the author (link).)

The book has many virtues. But most importantly, Lepore shows how the reality and legacy of slavery played a fundamental and debilitating role in the evolving history of the United States, from the writing of the Constitution to the political conflicts preceding the Civil War to the politics of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The realities of race are an essential part of American history.

More broadly, the book gives a full and broad account of disenfranchisement and discrimination in our history. Native Americans, women, freed slaves, and immigrants all find their voices and their struggles in this book -- not as secondary walk-on characters, but as shapers of history and actors in the narratives that made us the nation we are. Here is a passage early in the book in which Lepore makes clear the intertwining of liberty and slavery before the American Revolution:

Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure. In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition. The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves. (64)

And the issue of slavery continued to be the key dividing political issue through the Civil War, masked under the rhetoric of "states rights":

Southern slave owners, a tiny minority of Americans, amounting to about 1 percent of the population, deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights and free trade (by which they meant trade free from federal government regulation), but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery. The weakness of their position lay behind their efforts to silence dissent. (223)

There are fascinating turns to the story Lepore tells. One concerns America's most famous poem by its most famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849, and the change he introduced into the final version of the poem. Staunchly anti-slavery, Longfellow was deeply concerned for the fate of the Union.

By 1849, Longfellow, like most Americans who were paying attention, feared for the Republic. He began writing a poem, called “The Building of the Ship,” about a beautiful, rough-hewn ship called the Union. But as he closed the poem, he could imagine nothing but disaster for this worthy vessel. In his initial draft, he closed the poem with these lines: . . . where, oh where, Shall end this form so rare? . . . Wrecked upon some treacherous rock, Rotting in some loathsome dock, Such the end must be at length Of all this loveliness and strength!

But instead of ending on this note of despair and inspired by the political campaign of his friend Charles Sumner under the Free-Soil Party, he wrote: 

Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State! For thee the famished nations wait! The world seems hanging on thy fate! (259)

Close to the end of the Civil War that Longfellow so dreaded, Lepore quotes the equally poetic and compassionate words of President Abraham Lincoln, from his second inaugural address:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (304)

The third large part of the book is titled "Of Citizens, Persons, and People", and is very relevant to our current political morass. It tells much of the story of the struggle for full citizenship and voting rights for women, African-Americans, and other disenfranchised Americans. Equally it tells the story of the determined efforts of powerful racist, nationalist, and misogynist parties to prevent this from occurring. And it chronicles the rise of powerful corporations and economic interests which had their own political agendas and which so often worked against the wellbeing of working people.

Finance capitalism had brought tremendous gains to investors and created vast fortunes, inaugurating the era known as the Gilded Age, edged with gold. It spurred economic development and especially the growth of big businesses: big railroad companies, big agriculture companies, and, beginning in the 1870s, big steel companies. (335)

Lepore's account of the rise of populism and its ambiguous relationship to fundamental progressive values is worth the price of the book all by itself, given the ominous turn that populism has taken in the past few years.

Populism entered American politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers. (348)

And the conservative willingness -- even eagerness -- to discredit scientific knowledge emerges as a century-old impulse, not something invented in the climate-change-denial generation. In general, it is striking how consistent the anti-progressive voice is throughout the past century and more, and how deeply it informs the conservative agenda today. Further, it is hard to miss the nationalism and racism that have historically been part of that rhetoric. William Randolph Hearst seems strikingly contemporary, and McCarthyism, Nixon, weaponized media, and the decades-long struggle against universal health care resonate with today's headlines as well.

These Truths is an excellent work of historical synthesis that does not oversimplify, and distinctly does not portray US history as a steady march of progress. It makes it clear, really, that the values of equality, liberty, and mutual respect that many of us value so profoundly have been contested throughout our history, and that durable institutions embodying democracy and equality are still to be made, not simply celebrated.

(A good resource for high school history teachers who want to do a more adequate job of bringing difficult issues of race into their curriculum can be found at Facing History and Ourselves.)

Organizations and dysfunction

A recurring theme in recent months in Understanding Society is organizational dysfunction and the organizational causes of technology failure. Helmut Anheier's volume When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns is highly relevant to this topic, and it makes for very interesting reading. The volume includes contributions by a number of leading scholars in the sociology of organizations.

And yet the volume seems to miss the mark in some important ways. For one thing, it is unduly focused on the question of "mortality" of firms and other organizations. Bankruptcy and organizational death are frequent synonyms for "failure" here. This frame is evident in the summary the introduction offers of existing approaches in the field: organizational aspects, political aspects, cognitive aspects, and structural aspects. All bring us back to the causes of extinction and bankruptcy in a business organization. Further, the approach highlights the importance of internal conflict within an organization as a source of eventual failure. But it gives no insight into the internal structure and workings of the organization itself, the ways in which behavior and internal structure function to systematically produce certain kinds of outcomes that we can identify as dysfunctional.

Significantly, however, dysfunction does not routinely lead to death of a firm. (Seibel's contribution in the volume raises this possibility, which Seibel refers to as "successful failures"). This is a familiar observation from political science: what looks dysfunctional from the outside may be perfectly well tuned to a different set of interests (for example, in Robert Bates's account of pricing boards in Africa in Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies). In their introduction to this volume Anheier and Moulton refer to this possibility as a direction for future research: "successful for whom, a failure for whom?" (14).

The volume tends to look at success and failure in terms of profitability and the satisfaction of stakeholders. But we can define dysfunction in a more granular way by linking characteristics of performance to the perceived "purposes and goals" of the organization. A regulatory agency exists in order to effectively project the health and safety of the public. In this kind of case, failure is any outcome in which the agency flagrantly and avoidably fails to prevent a serious harm -- release of radioactive material, contamination of food, a building fire resulting from defects that should have been detected by inspection. If it fails to do so as well as it might then it is dysfunctional.

Why do dysfunctions persist in organizations? It is possible to identify several possible causes. The first is that a dysfunction from one point of view may well be a desirable feature from another point of view. The lack of an authoritative safety officer in a chemical plant may be thought to be dysfunctional if we are thinking about the safety of workers and the public as a primary goal of the plant (link). But if profitability and cost-savings are the primary goals from the point of view of the stakeholders, then the cost-benefit analysis may favor the lack of the safety officer.

Second, there may be internal failures within an organization that are beyond the reach of any executive or manager who might want to correct them. The complexity and loose-coupling of large organizations militate against house cleaning on a large scale.

Third, there may be powerful factions within an organization for whom the "dysfunctional" feature is an important component of their own set of purposes and goals. Fligstein and McAdam argue for this kind of disaggregation with their theory of strategic action fields (link). By disaggregating purposes and goals to the various actors who figure in the life cycle of the organization – founders, stakeholders, executives, managers, experts, frontline workers, labor organizers – it is possible to see the organization as a whole as simply the aggregation of the multiple actions and purposes of the actors within and adjacent to the organization. This aggregation does not imply that the organization is carefully adjusted to serve the public good or to maximize efficiency or to protect the health and safety of the public. Rather, it suggests that the resultant organizational structure serves the interests of the various actors to the fullest extent each actor is able to manage.

Consider the account offered by Thomas Misa of the decline of the steel industry in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century in A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925. Misa's account seems to point to a massive dysfunction in the steel corporations of the inter-war period, a deliberate and sustained failure to invest in research on new steel technologies in metallurgy and production. Misa argues that the great steel corporations -- US Steel in particular -- failed to remain competitive in their industry in the early years of the twentieth century because management persistently pursued short-term profits and financial advantage for the company through domination of the market at the expense of research and development. It relied on market domination instead of research and development for its source of revenue and profits.

In short, U.S. Steel was big but not illegal. Its price leadership resulted from its complete dominance in the core markets for steel.... Indeed, many steelmakers had grown comfortable with U.S. Steel's overriding policy of price and technical stability, which permitted them to create or develop markets where the combine chose not to compete, and they testified to the court in favor of the combine. The real price of stability ... was the stifling of technological innovation. (255)

The result was that the modernized steel industries in Europe leap-frogged the previous US advantage and eventually led to unviable production technology in the United States.

At the periphery of the newest and most promising alloy steels, dismissive of continuous-sheet rolling, actively hostile to new structural shapes, a price leader but not a technical leader: this was U.S. Steel. What was the company doing with technological innovation? (257)

 Misa is interested in arriving at a better way of understanding the imperatives leading to technical change -- better than neoclassical economics and labor history. His solution highlights the changing relationships that developed between industrial consumers and producers in the steel industry.

We now possess a series of powerful insights into the dynamics of technology and social change. Together, these insights offer the realistic promise of being better able, if we choose, to modulate the complex process of technical change. We can now locate the range of sites for technical decision making, including private companies, trade organizations, engineering societies, and government agencies. We can suggest a typology of user-producer interactions, including centralized, multicentered, decentralized, and direct-consumer interactions, that will enable certain kinds of actions while constraining others. We can even suggest a range of activities that are likely to effect technical change, including standards setting, building and zoning codes, and government procurement. Furthermore, we can also suggest a range of strategies by which citizens supposedly on the "outside" may be able to influence decisions supposedly made on the "inside" about technical change, including credibility pressure, forced technology choice, and regulatory issues. (277-278)

In fact Misa places the dynamic of relationship between producer and large consumer at the center of the imperatives towards technological innovation:

In retrospect, what was wrong with U.S. Steel was not its size or even its market power but its policy of isolating itself from the new demands from users that might have spurred technical change. The resulting technological torpidity that doomed the industry was not primarily a matter of industrial concentration, outrageous behavior on the part of white- and blue-collar employees, or even dysfunctional relations among management, labor, and government. What went wrong was the industry's relations with its consumers. (278)

This relative "callous treatment of consumers" was profoundly harmful when international competition gave large industrial users of steel a choice. When US Steel had market dominance, large industrial users had little choice; but this situation changed after WWII. "This favorable balance of trade eroded during the 1950s as German and Japanese steelmakers rebuilt their bombed-out plants with a new production technology, the basic oxygen furnace (BOF), which American steelmakers had dismissed as unproven and unworkable" (279). Misa quotes a president of a small steel producer: "The Big Steel companies tend to resist new technologies as long as they can ... They only accept a new technology when they need it to survive" (280).

***

Here is an interesting table from Misa's book that sheds light on some of the economic and political history in the United States since the post-war period, leading right up to the populist politics of 2016 in the Midwest. This chart provides mute testimony to the decline of the rustbelt industrial cities. Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western New York account for 83% of the steel production on this table. When American producers lost the competitive battle for steel production in the 1980s, the Rustbelt suffered disproportionately, anad eventually blue collar workers lost their places in the affluent economy.

Ethical disasters

Many examples of technical disasters have been provided in Understanding Society, along with efforts to understand the systemic dysfunctions that contributed to their occurrence. Frequently those dysfunctions fall within the business organizations that manage large, complex technology systems, and often enough those dysfunctions derive from the imperatives of profit-maximization and cost avoidance. Andrew Hopkins' account of the business decisions contributing to the explosion of the ESSO gas plant in Longford, Australia illustrates this dynamic in Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion. The withdrawal of engineering experts from the plant to a remote corporate headquarters was a cost-saving move that, according to Hopkins, contributed to the eventual disaster.

A topic we have not addressed in detail is the occurrence of ethical disasters -- terrible outcomes that are the result of deliberate choices by decision-makers within an organization that are, upon inspection, clearly and profoundly unethical and immoral. The collapse of Enron is probably one such disaster; the Bernie Madoff scandal is another. But it seems increasingly likely that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family's business leadership of the corporation represent another major example. Recent reporting by ProPublica, the Atlantic, and the New York Times relies on documents collected in the course of litigation against Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family in Massachusetts and New York. (Here are the unredacted court documents on which much of this reporting depends; link.) These documents make it hard to avoid the ethical conclusion that the Sackler family actively participated in business strategies for their company Purdue Pharma that treated the OxyContin addiction epidemic as an expanding business opportunity. And this seems to be a huge ethical breach.

This set of issues is currently unresolved by the courts, so it rests with the legal system to resolve the facts and the issues of legal culpability. But as citizens we all have the ability to read the documents and make our own decisions about the ethical status of decisions and strategies made by the family and the corporation over the course of this disaster. The point here is simply to ask these key questions: how should we think about the ethical status of decisions and strategies of owners and managers that lead to terrible harms, and harms that could reasonably have been anticipated? How should a company or a set of owners respond to a catastrophe in which several hundred thousand people have died, and which was facilitated in part by deliberate marketing efforts by the company and the owners? How should the company have adjusted its business when it became apparent that its product was creating addiction and widespread death?

First, here are a few details from the current reporting about the case. Here are a few paragraphs from the ProPublica story (January 30, 2019):

Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts. 

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges. (ProPublica 1/30/2019; link)

The NYT story reproduces a diagram included in the New York court filings that illustrates the company's business strategy of "Project Tango" -- the idea that the company could make money both from sales of its pain medication and from sales of treatments for the addiction it caused.

Further, according to the reporting provided by the NYT and ProPublica, members of the Sackler family used their positions on the Purdue Pharma board to press for more aggressive business exploitation of the opportunities described here:

In 2009, two years after the federal guilty plea, Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a board member, demanded to know why the company wasn't selling more opioids, email traffic cited by Massachusetts prosecutors showed. In 2011, as states looked for ways to curb opioid prescriptions, family members peppered the sales staff with questions about how to expand the market for the drugs.... The family's statement said they were just acting as responsible board members, raising questions about "business issues that were highly relevant to doctors and patients. (NYT 4/1/2019; link)

From the 1/30/2019 ProPublica story, and based on more court documents:

Citing extensive emails and internal company documents, the redacted sections allege that Purdue and the Sackler family went to extreme lengths to boost OxyContin sales and burnish the drug’s reputation in the face of increased regulation and growing public awareness of its addictive nature. Concerns about doctors improperly prescribing the drug, and patients becoming addicted, were swept aside in an aggressive effort to drive OxyContin sales ever higher, the complaint alleges. (link)

And ProPublica underlines the fact that prosecutors believe that family members have personal responsibility for the management of the corporation:

The redacted paragraphs leave little doubt about the dominant role of the Sackler family in Purdue’s management. The five Purdue directors who are not Sacklers always voted with the family, according to the complaint. The family-controlled board approves everything from the number of sales staff to be hired to details of their bonus incentives, which have been tied to sales volume, the complaint says. In May 2017, when longtime employee Craig Landau was seeking to become Purdue’s chief executive, he wrote that the board acted as “de-facto CEO.” He was named CEO a few weeks later. (link)

The courts will resolve the question of legal culpability. The question here is one of the ethical standards that should govern the actions and strategies of owners and managers. Here are several simple ethical observations that seem relevant to this case.

First, it is obvious that pain medication is a good thing when used appropriately under the supervision of expert and well-informed physicians. Pain management enhances quality of life for people experiencing pain.

Second, addiction is plainly a bad thing, and it is worse when it leads to predictable death or disability for its victims. A company has a duty of concern for the quality of life of human beings affected by its product, and this extends to a duty to take all possible precautions to minimize the likelihood that human beings will be harmed by the product.

Third, given that the risks of addiction that were known about this product, the company has a moral obligation to treat its relations with physicians and other health providers as occasions of accurate and truthful education about the product, not opportunities for persuasion, inducement, and marketing. Rather than a sales force of representatives whose incomes are determined by the quantity of the product they sell, the company has a moral obligation to train and incentivize its representatives to function as honest educators providing full information about the risks as well as the benefits of the product. And, of course, it has an obligation not to immerse itself in the dynamics of "conflict of interest" discussed elsewhere (link) -- this means there should be no incentives provided to the physicians who agree to prescribe the product.

Fourth, it might be argued that the profits generated by the business of a given pharmaceutical product should be used proportionally to ameliorate the unavoidable harms it creates. Rather than making billions in profits from the sale of the product, and then additional hundreds of millions on products that offset the addictions and illness created by dissemination of the product (this was the plan advanced as "Project Tango"), the company and its owners should hold themselves accountable for the harms created by their product. (That is, the social and human costs of addiction should not be treated as "externalities" or even additional sources of profit for the company.)

Finally, there is an important question at a more individual scale. How should we think about super-rich owners of a company who seem to lose sight entirely of the human tragedies created by their company's product and simply demand more profits, more timely distribution of the profits, and more control of the management decisions of the company? These are individual human beings, and surely they have a responsibility to think rigorously about their own moral responsibilities. The documents released in these court proceedings seem to display an amazing blindness to moral responsibility on the part of some of these owners.

(There are other important cases illustrating the clash between moral responsibility, corporate profits, and corporate decision-making, having to do with the likelihood of collaboration between American companies, their German and Polish subsidiaries, and the Nazi regime during World War II. Edwin Black argues in IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation-Expanded Edition that the US-based computer company provided important support for Germany's extermination strategy. Here is a 2002 piece from the Guardian on the update of Black's book providing more documentary evidence for this claim; link. And here is a piece from the Washington Post on American car companies in Nazi Germany; link. )

(Stephen Arbogast's Resisting Corporate Corruption: Cases in Practical Ethics From Enron Through The Financial Crisis is an interesting source on corporate ethics.)

Development ethnography and the life of the poor

Indian economists V. K. Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan have edited a highly interesting volume, Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the progress of India in recent years. The book is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India, and all the essays are very good.

Ramachandran's own contribution is a piece of what we might call "development ethnography", a pair of interviews (link) with the Tamil Nadu landless worker Gabriel Selvam. This case study is a valuable document for anyone interested in poverty and global justice. Ramachandran conducted interviews with Selvam at both ends of Selvam's working life, in 1977 and 2017, and the experiences that Selvam describes are emblematic of the extreme poor in India and elsewhere throughout that forty-year period. Selvam has lived most of his life in rural Tamil Nadu, near the town of Gokilapuram. And Selvam's life history illustrates many of the deep themes of enduring poverty and inequality in rural India -- debt, bonded labor, inadequate access to land, caste, and extremely limited opportunities for collective action.

Usury involving a sum of only 100 rupees forced Selvam into a form of debt bondage to a landlord: "Selvam attached himself as a farm servant for a remuneration of Rs 65 per month, plus one sheet, a dhoti, a shirt and a thunda (towel-cloth) a year." He worked 13 hours a day for the salary of Rs 65 per month. After four years the salary increased to Rs 100 per month. (At the 2000 exchange rate of Rs 45 / dollar this is about $2.22 / month.)

Debt bondage has been formally illegal in India since 1976. But Selvam's condition is clearly one of debt bondage: "There is no choice, I can't leave my mudalali [employer, landlord] unless I can clear my debt of Rs 300. I would certainly like to leave."

Largescale eviction from farm land is also a part of Selvam's story. Green Revolution seeds and techniques made farm land more profitable, and landlords had an interest in evicting poor farmers from the land they had previously rented at low rents. Poor farmers became landless workers.

The persistent and debilitating disadvantages of caste in rural India are evident in this story as well. Selvam is of a scheduled caste, and it seems apparent that the wage differentials that he experienced throughout his working life had much to do with his dalit status.

Destitution-level housing is also a striking part of the story that Selvam tells. In 1977: "As for his home, Selvam cannot afford to erect a complete hut. When he gets a small amount of money, he adds a row of bricks to the hut. Some months ago, he bought a door-frame. Now, there is a door-frame, fixed with mud into a few rows of country-made brick, with no wall around it or roof above. The single room in the hut is 8 feet by 6 feet." In 2017, the time of the second interview, the hut has been completed: "it is completed and expanded now: a neat, whitewashed structure that has the meagre furniture and appurtenances of a house that is still, after all, the house of a full-time rural manual worker."

In 2017 Selvam's wage has also improved; he now earns Rs 4000 per month for hard agricultural labor -- in today's exchange rate, about $40 / month. As Selvam says, they are better off. And yet it is clear -- "better off" in Selvam's village still means poor access to education and healthcare, limited nutrition, an extremely low income, and a life of toil that few Americans can even imagine.

I hope that you will read the whole interview. It is a more powerful testament to the depth of poverty and inequality in rural India than any set of economic statistics could ever convey.

Here is a World Bank report that makes for excellent parallel reading alongside Ramachandran's case history (Raji Jayaraman and Peter Lanjouw, "The Evolution of Poverty and Inequality in Indian Villages"; link).