Ethics – Page 10

September 27, 1962

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962): Pesticides Are Killing Birds and Mammals

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 27 September 1962. Elizabeth Kolbert: “As much as any book can, “Silent Spring” changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts, and the banning of a long list of pesticides, including dieldrin.” Silent Spring was first serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962.

Part I of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 16 June 1962, can be read here.

Part II of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 23 June 1962, can be read here.

Part III of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in The New Yorker, 30 June 1962, can be read here.

August 31, 1946

Hiroshima

John Hersey, Hiroshima. The New Yorker, 31 August 1946. “TO OUR READERS: The New Yorker this week [31 August 1946] devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. The Editors.” Jon Michaud, Eighty-Five From the Archive: John Hersey. The New Yorker, 8 June 2010: “Perhaps the most notable feature of “Hiroshima” is Hersey’s precise and unadorned style, which simply records the facts and places the moral and interpretive onus on the reader.” Paris Review Interview with John Hersey, Summer-Fall 1986: “My choice was to be deliberately quiet in the piece, because I thought that if the horror could be presented as directly as possible, it would allow the reader to identify with the characters in a direct way.” John Hersey in a letter to historian Paul Boyer: “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader’s experience would be as direct as possible.”

January 13, 1941

George Seldes on Health Hazards of Tobacco (1940-1950)

George Seldes, In Fact, 1940-1950. brasscheck.com: “In 1940, Seldes began publishing In Fact, a 4-page newsletter devoted to press criticism and investigative reporting. He subtitled the weekly ‘An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press.’ In the January 13, 1941 issue of In Fact, Seldes published his first cigarette story: a report about the 1938 study by Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University that showed that heavy cigarette-smoking severely limited one’s life span.”

October 5, 1936

The Harvest Gypsies: Migrant Agriculture Laborers in California in the 1930s

John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies. San Francisco News, 5-12 October 1936. PBS, Need to Know, 1 March 2013: “Before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck was commissioned by The San Francisco News to write a series of articles on the migrant laborers of the Salinas Valley. The result, ‘The Harvest Gypsies” (1936) were published consecutively from October 5 to October 12, 1936. In 1938 the Simon J. Lubin Society published The Harvest Gypsies, with an added eighth chapter, in pamphlet form under the title, Their Blood is Strong. Steinbeck’s reportage is stark. The images seen in the Farm Security Administration’s photos bear out his every word.”

January 15, 1935

Two Thousand Dying on a Job: Silicosis deaths resulting from working on the Hawks Mountain Tunnel Project in West Virginia in the early 1930s

Bernard Allen, Two Thousand Dying on a Job. New Masses, 15 January 1935. “Two thousand workmen, according to the estimated figures of the contractors, were employed for over a period of two years [in the early 1930s] in drilling a three and three-quarter mile tunnel under a mountain from Gauley’s Junction to Hawk’s Nest in Fayette County, West Virginia. The rock through which these men bored was sandstone of a high silica content (in tunnel number one it ran from 97 percent pure silica to as high as 99.4 percent) and the contracting company neglected to provide any safety devices.”

March 27, 1911

The 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Eyewitness at the Triangle

William Shepherd, Eyewitness at the Triangle. Milwaukee Journal, 27 March 1911. “The nation learned of the horrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company through the eyewitness account of a United Press reporter who happened to be in Washington Square on March 25, 1911. He phoned in details while watching the tragedy unfold. At the other end of the telephone, young Roy Howard telegraphed Shepherd’s story to the nation’s newspapers.” [Read more…]

March 27, 1911 Filed Under: Corporations, Ethics, Labor Tagged With: 1911 triangle shirtwaist factory fire, immigrant workers, industrial tragedy, inhumane working conditions, international labor movement, national women's trade union league, new york factory investigative commission, progressive era reform movement, sweatshops

November 1, 1909

The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall

George Kibbe Turner, The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall. McClure’s, November 1909.

September 1, 1908

The Race War in the North: White Mob Violence Against Blacks in Springfield, Illinois in 1908

William English Walling, The Race War in the North: White Mob Violence Against Blacks in Springfield, Illinois in 1908. The Independent, September 1908. Spartacus Educational: “In August, 1908, Walling and his wife witnessed the Springfield Riot in Illinois, where a white mob attacked local African Americans. During the riot two were lynched, six killed, and over 2,000 African Americans were forced to leave the city. In an article entitled, The Race War in the North, that he wrote for The Independent about the riot, Walling [wrote] that ‘a large part of the white population’ in the area were waging ‘permanent warfare with the Negro race.’ Walling argued that the only way to reduce this conflict was ‘to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality.'”

[Read more…]

September 1, 1908 Filed Under: Criminal Justice, Ethics, Racism Tagged With: lynchings, race hatred and warfare, white mob violence against blacks in springfield illinois in 1908

June 1, 1908

A Burglar in the Making: The State of Georgia Leases Convicts to Private Persons and Corporations

Charles Edward Russell, A Burglar in the Making: The State of Georgia Leases Convicts to Private Persons and Corporations. Everybody’s Magazine, June 1908. Editor’s Note: “This terrible story of life in a Georgia convicts’ camp was related to Mr. Russell by a one-time criminal, now a man reformed and regenerated. For apparent reasons, the man’s identity must be carefully guarded here; but all the essentials of the narrative are exactly as recited. Many of them Mr. Russell has been able to verify from his own observations; the others can be accepted upon faith. They reveal clearly the shameful system by which the State of Georgia surrenders for profits the solemn duty of correcting her wrong-doers, and thereby insures day after day the perpetuation of evils that result in the murder of souls and the making of hardened and desperate criminals. There is a broader application of the momentous lesson of these facts than to the State of Georgia. In a way that you have never suspected, but is here made plain, the convicts’ camp in Georgia is but a symbol or type of conditions existing in every part of the United States.”

March 1, 1906

The Treason of the Senate: How the US Senate is Owned by ‘The Monied Interests’

David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate: New York’s Misrepresentatives and Aldrich, The Head of It All. Cosmopolitan, March 1906. From New York’s Misrepresentatives: “Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom.”