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Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States.The pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire (September 3, 1919) and its aftermath (twenty-five people perished that day behind the never-inspected chicken-processing plant’s locked and bolted doors) reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Bryant Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy in The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives.

Bryant Simon is a professor of history at Temple University.