The mayoral election this year in Hudson does at least present one clear choice: a choice between the future and the past. Will this small City look ahead, or try to turn the clock back to a mythic, imaginary past?
Admittedly, the whole future/past thing is one of the more tired political clichés. But this particular race maybe be the rare case where it has meaning, since the candidates have explicitly staked out positions that fit the old formula.
In a recent debate, Nick Haddad’s forward-leaning campaign theme was summarized by Carole Osterink at Gossips as
... the need to provide a future for Hudson that “reflects our aspirations.” Haddad talked about jobs, opportunity, and quality of life. He talked about making our school a “magnet for people” and said of Hudson that it is “more than shovel-ready, and we have the work force.” He also urged that we be “Hudsoncentric,” working together to ensure a bright future.
That’s solid, if expected, stuff, from the Democratic candidate, whose slogan is Let’s Move Hudson Forward, Together.
His Republican opponent, by contrast, is an unabashed proponent of trying to drag Hudson backward through time. In his few public statements, as well as in several reported conversations with voters, Bill Hallenbeck has harped on how long he has lived here as his primary qualification—and waxed poetic about the glory days of Hudson’s industrial past. Though he was still in diapers when Lone Star Cement closed, he remembers those times as a Golden Age. Hard evidence, such as the contemporaneous narrative in this detailed study from 1963, suggests the reality was far more tinhorn, and even tarnished.
Such nostalgic notions represent more than just a well-worn demagogic rhetorical material. It’s also a familiar refrain for this particular GOP candidate. In a long March 2001 opinion piece published locally, Hallenbeck lavishly thanked St. Lawrence Cement for hiring him as a paid canvasser. After recounting a litany of businesses that abandoned Hudson, Hallenbeck singled out the antiques dealers who embraced the City when it fell on hard times as out of step with the community. He rhapsodized about his “fond memories” of a Norman Rockwellesque era when, in his mind’s eye at least, “mostly everyone live comfortable [sic] and securely.”
Hallenbeck then turned to his short-term employer, SLC:
With the efforts of the St. Lawrence Cement plant attempting to build a $320 million, state-of-the-art cement plant in this area, we have an opportunity [to] acquire the stability and comfort once shared by our parents and grandparents when they were raising us. Thank you for bringing back ... the ability for all of us living here to again have the expectations of living the American Dream. We support you 110 percent. Good luck!
Hallenbeck omitted mention of the many cement industry widows whose husbands died young. At about the same time as Hallenbeck’s editorial appeared, it was deeply moving for me to meet with several of these survivors at a meeting at A.M.E. Zion Church. With the expert analysis of Dr. Ira Marks—who delivered countless babies at Columbia Memorial Hospital—we discussed the asthma-causing effects of fine particle pollution on young lungs; their heart attack-inducing impacts among the elderly; and the carcinogenic components of microscopic dust. The cost of living in the shadow of such facilities was profoundly understood by many attendees, because this was not theoretical science to them, but a reality they’d lived. (Who knows, Dr. Marks may have even delivered Bill Hallenbeck. How’s that for nostalgia?)
Within four years of Hallenbeck’s love letter to SLC, the phony job and environmental claims which he’d eagerly accepted—and then spread as an employee—had been completely debunked. During the final comment period, not one public official wrote in support of the project, a striking turnaround from when it was announced nearly 7 years earlier. Of a record 14,000 comments submitted, 87% were opposed, with the 13% still in support coming, ironically enough, mainly from union halls in faraway places like Syracuse and Long Island. (So much for the company’s nativist strategy, which we hear strong echoes of in Hallenbeck’s campaign today.) Reason had prevailed against both false hope and fabricated memories.
Like Hallenbeck even to this day, SLC had sought to create a gauzy vision of the past, where every able-bodied man carried a lunchbucket to a well-paying industrial job. Everything, they would have you believe, was just about perfect in Hudson—until those dratted (rich, gay) newcomers showed up. The company commissioned a clumsy short movie entitled Etched in Stone to help falsify memory, and further inflame latent us vs. them tensions. The company’s rose-colored lens omitted mention of the “brown snow” which used to fall on Hudson when the Atlas and Lone Star plants were running, which I know about from none other than mayor’s aide Carmine Pierro—who once recalled it in a moment of candor during a lull in a public hearing at Columbia-Greene.
While one can debate whether things were ever so wonderful, the stark reality is that due to globalization, automation, and wage stagnancy, big industries simply do not provide the types of jobs they did a half-century ago. Open your arms to the likes of SLC, as Bill Hallenbeck did, and Hudson would have suffered all the downsides of the past, with few of the benefits. More pollution and only one new job proved the stark reality of the cement proposal, one that the public, State and City came to reject once they had the chance to think a bit harder than Hallenbeck had about their lavish p.r. claims.
And yet Mr. Hallenbeck touted his time with SLC as “one of the most educational and rewarding experiences of my life.” That’s one memory that Hudson voters might want to heed on Election Day.
NOTE: Hallenbeck’s work for St. Lawrence Cement, a subsidiary of Holcim, occurred in the midst of what he has unmodestly described as his “stellar” career in law enforcement. His 2001 opinion piece alluded to “a trying time” when he was “out of work for a while, and trying to manage without my normal income during the holiday season.” But it provided no explanation for this odd gap in his policing career. If nothing else, that past employment would create an obvious conflict of interest in the event that Hallenbeck were elected, and had to negotiate with Holcim, which recently has brought a lawsuit over its taxes against the City.
Birgit Scaglione
Check out this new packaging from pickle giant Vlasic, a subsidiary of Pinnacle Foods—which also owns Bird’s Eye, Aunt Jemima, Swanson and Lender’s Bagels among other things, and is in turn owned by the multibillion financial group Blackstone Group.*
Someone in Vlasic’s marketing department realized that artisinal, farmers’ market “look” would be a good move in the current market... And indeed, the packaging did momentarily fool me into thinking that Aunt Mabel canned these in her root cellar high in the Catskills, or something like that.
Major food companies have been biting natural food store style for a while now. Even the potato chip aisle of the supermarket is now crammed with sea-salt encrusted fried taters packaged in plastic that looks vaguely like a paper bag. And there is, of course, also a blog devoted solely to tracking this stuff.
Anyway, a term for this is needed, along the lines of “astroturfing” (for fake grassroots groups organized by big business). Probably one already exists, but for the moment and for lack of a better term, I’m going with f’artisanal—for fake artisinal. Or maybe that should be phartisinal, the “ph” standing for “phony.” (I’m leaning toward the f’, as the apostrophe lends it that extra ersatz air.)
Expect to see a lot more f’artisinal or phartisinal products on your market shelves in the next few months and years. As noted at Man Are We Screwed,
Marketers know that consumers buy into this artisan imagery. More than 800 new food products have christened themselves artisan something-or-other in the past five years, reports researcher Datamonitor. While fewer than 80 new foods dubbed themselves artisan just four years ago, the number more than doubled to nearly 200 in 2010.
“The word artisan suggests that the product is less likely to be mass-produced,” says Tom Vierhile, innovation insights director at Datamonitor. “It also suggests the product may be less processed and perhaps better tasting and maybe even be better for you.”
As even USA Today has noted by now, you can start your day with a Starbucks Artisan Breakfast Sandwich, snack on Frito-Lay’s Artisan Recipe Tostitos, and have dinner in front of the TV with a Domino’s Artisan Pizza. For at least 20 years now, the real genius of American consumer capitalism has been its ability to quickly spot “fringe” trends which have mainstream marketing potential.
(Exhibit A: Urban Outfitters. Way back in the mid-’90s, I started work on a script for a never-achieved movie tentatively entitled The Thrifters. The story was about bunch of impoverished Williamsburg/Lower East Side hipsters who unknowingly get hired by a shady marketing guy to roam the country’s secondhand and vintage shops, prospecting for thriftstore finds. The marketing guy hasn’t told them that he works for J. Screw, which plans to convert their coolhunting into mainstream merchandising millions... They’d eventually wise up and sour on the enterprise, with their road trip then heading into Thelma & Louise or U Turn territory. The plot might have been slightly novel c. 1995; today it would just be a shrug-inducing documentary of existing reality...)
And even before this f’artisinal/phartisinal trend crests, already it’s being over: The New York Times this past week announced that authenticity is over—even as others try to reassert the validity and integrity of handmade goods.Take that, West Elm... Meanwhile, the phenomenon is hardly new. As Paul Goodman wrote more than 50 years ago in The Empire City:
If I was ready to vomit in those earlier days, what dirty words must I emply to mention the decades of 1920-1940, the sabbath of publicity and advertising, and every word of it an insult to honor and intelligence? Even the conceivable perfections of life are trivial; but what a degrading, ruinous and wasted effort to try for a single one in this sinkk of corruption! Who could have a clean taste?
Or, per a suggestion of a Gawker commenter, as Bill Hicks put it:
* A small-but-not-entirely-unexpected irony: per Wikipedia, Vlasic did actually grow out of a small local business based in Detroit, founded by a Croatian immigrant named Franjo Vlašić roughly 100 years ago.
The iPhone has pretty much killed off my doodling habit, by eliminating the need to carry a paper notebook. (This one was from 2008.)
In 1954, Hudson and the vicinity were severely afflicted with unemployment [...] so serious that the entire vicinity was designated a critical unemployment area, and Hudson was listed as eligible to receive Federal Government surplus food for distribution.
Since then, unemployment has not appreciably decreased. For the past few years, the Gifford Wood Company and the cement industry have operated with sharply curtailed labor. [...] The reduction in the labor force in the cement industry is due to automation and the decreased demand.”
—R. MARY WEND (1963)
This November 5th would be the 112th birthday of R. Mary Wend, who was born in 1899 and died in 1975. There is precious little information about Wend on the web, and I know next to nothing about her—except that she wrote an exceptionally insightful capsule history of Hudson. It is essential reading for all local residents, new and old.
By clicking here, you can read about 20 pages of Wend’s remarkably concise and incisive 1963 master’s thesis, The Administrative Effects of the Breakdown of Law Enforcement in Hudson, New York.* That dry title masked a story that, some 20 years later, Bruce Edward Hall would tell in more antic, if somewhat less analytical, terms in his well-known Diamond Street—which appears to have relied heavily on Wend’s text.
Her paper is chockful of telling but largely forgotten local details, for example the claim that Hudson lost out becoming the home of General Electric because of “the unwillingness of local merchants to raise $10,000.” (That surely would have been an economic blessing, but it also might have made Hudson ground zero of today’s PCB cleanup.)
Wend traces not just the familiar story of the Proprietors arrival around the end of the Revolutionary War and Hudson’s quick rise to prominence, but also the less-rosy decades which ensued—including the decision to sell of much of Hudson’s acreage to form neighboring towns, a/k/a “the partitioning.”
She finds that almost from the start, Hudson’s wheel of fortune spun in cycles of boom and bust. These at first stemmed from the travails of the whaling industry, but continued far into the 20th Century. By 1845, which Wend identifies as the “end of the era of navigation,” Hudson was in collapse, setting the stage for the spread of vice and its concomitant political corruption:
Shorn of its prestige, divested of most of its territory, stripped of its fleet of ships, Hudson faced the future with uncertainty. As a city of commercial importance—its course had been run; its day was done.
Wend’s research also shows how political and moral corruption was a chronic and nearly intractable problem throughout much of Hudson history, right up to the 1960s. Periods of decline inevitably led to the election of a “reform” Mayor. However, the reformer quickly would either get co-opted by the corrupt City establishment, or else would quit in frustration.
The following 120 years she characterizes as “The Era of Stagnation.” Wend quotes Gorham Worth’s description of Hudson in the mid-19th Century as having “an all pervading air of listlessness.” Local politicians, law enforcement, the Chamber of Commerce and an apathetic citizenry alike get a sober but sound drubbing from Wend’s pen. About the latter she writes:
A significant contributing factor to the stagnation of the city was the penny-wise, pound-foolish attitude of the average taxpayer toward municipal expenditures.
An extreme example of this “municipal parsimony” came in 1855, when “due to an empty treasury and a dispute with the gas company,” the Common Council
was obliged to discontinue street lighting. [...] When it was bombarded with petitions to restore this service, it called a taxpayer’s election to raise $1200 to pay for this service until the end of the year. [But] the taxpayers were unwilling to be taxed for it, and at the election, the proposition was overwhelmingly defeated. For the remainder of the year the city was in darkness [and] the commission of crimes was greatly accelerated.
By 1868, the once-advanced City of Hudson had become, per Wend, “an old fogey town” and “hopelessly behind the times.” Even the purchase of a then-modern steam fire engine to replace hand-operated equipment was rejected by the populace, who only reversed their position after a calamitous fire.
Education was another sore point: in the 1880s, it was found that less than 25% of school-age children were attending classes. That problem had apparently been reversed by the 1930s, when the schools were found to suffer from precisely the opposite problem: overcrowding. Hudson voters rejected the construction of a new school despite funding offered by the Federal Public Works Administration (their version of “stimulus” funds). Again, the situation had to reach crisis proportions before the 45% funding was finally accepted and the new school built.
The ’50s-era Chamber’s top request to a visiting Governor Harriman was to plead for the shutdown of the Volunteer Fireman’s Home and Training School for Girls (now the prison).** Much like some official present-day attitudes in Greenport toward Olana, leaders of that time bellyached about such institutions not paying taxes, while dismissing their employment, purchasing and other economic impacts.
By 1963, Wend summarized the State of Hudson as “a stagnant city beset by many problems.” These she enumerated as:
The more things change...
* When first in Hudson in 1998, I encountered a copy in the musty old history room of the library, where I volunteered for some time (straightening up after visitors, who mainly seemed interested in the genealogy books). A copy also used to exist at the Columbia County Historical Society. Whether either can still be found, given the long history of misfiling, pilfering and neglect of such local archives, I do not know. The entire thing really ought to be scanned and republished.
** Hall provides one of the only known details about Wend’s life, and obliquely acknowledging his debt to her writing. Wend, he says, served as the Training School’s “resident dentist,” and describing her as “an older woman of frugal ingenuity and worldly knowledge; she had tried to straighten inmates’ teeth with bamboo braces of her own design, and she had written a master’s thesis on the history of prostitution in the city of Hudson.”
County Route 27, Taghkanic (NY).
Via the “always interesting” Shorpy. (It still looks pretty much exactly like this.)
Photoshopping by OuroborosX, on Flickr.
