Smelting Pot

My thanks to Sean Gohman and William Rose of Michigan Tech and Tom Wright of the Quincy Mine and Hoist Association for their generosity in abetting my fieldwork in the Keweenaw Peninsula; to Marina Resende Santos for research assistance; and to Joshua G. Stein for his readings of this essay in draft form. According to Walter Dennis Gray, Laboulaye was in fact the first French academic to teach American history. Walter Dennis Gray, Interpreting American Democracy in France: The Career of Édouard Laboulaye, 1811-1883 (University of Delaware Press, 1994), 55-72.

See Stephen W. Sawyer, “Édouard Laboulaye and the Statue of Liberty: Forging the Democratic Experience,” The Letter of the Collège de France 4 (2008–09): 55–56. For more on Laboulaye, see Walter Dennis Gray, Interpreting American Democracy in France: The Career of Édouard Laboulaye, 1811-1883 (University of Delaware Press, 1994).

These developments are carefully laid out in Chapter 8 of Yasmin Sabina Khan, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 117-32.

Qtd. in Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Described by the Sculptor. Published for the Benefit of the Pedestal Fund. (New York: North American Review, 1885), 53, ➝, and in YA Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) DLC, An Appeal to the People of the United States, in Behalf of the Great Statue, Liberty Enlightening the World (New York: s.n., 1884), 2, ➝.

Frontispiece to Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Described by the Sculptor. Published for the Benefit of the Pedestal Fund. (New York: North American Review, 1885), ➝.

William Clark D.D., D.C.L., ed., Empire Club Speeches; Being Addresses Delivered before the Empire Club of Canada During its Session of 1903-04 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1904), 94.

Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2015), xiii.

Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, The Goncourt Journals, 1851-1870, trans. Lewis Galantière (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), letter of May 27, 1867.

For the role of photography in creation of the statue see Luce Lebart and Sam Stourdze, Lady Liberty (Paris: Le Seuil, 2016), and a review of the accompanying show, Sarah Moroz, “How Photography Helped Build the Statue of Liberty,” New York Times: Lens Blog, ➝.

“Let us respond in like manner. Let us not wait for the millionaires to give us this money.” Joseph Pulitzer, “The Unfinished Pedestal: What Shall Be Done with the Great Bartholdi Statue?,” New York World, March 16, 1885.

See Jean-Marie Welter, “Understanding the Copper of the Statue of Liberty,” JOM; New York 58, no. 5 (May 2006): 30–33. As will be reinforced later, the amount of confusion surrounding the copper used in the Statue is substantial. Khan’s account, by far one of the most thorough, names as the benefactor Japy Fréres, a French metal manufacturer that owned a mine at Vigsnes, in Norway.

See Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture (Paris: A. Morel & Cie Éditeurs, 1863), ➝.

From his speech to the Franco-American Union at the Hôtel du Louvre of November 6, 1875: Édouard Laboulaye, Derniers discours populaires de Édouard Laboulaye (Paris: G. Charpentier et cie., 1886), 226.

Useful and highly accessible sources for understanding the byproducts of smelting appear in Bill Carter, Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story about Copper, the Metal That Runs the World (Tucson: Schaffner Press, Incorporated, 2014), Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), and (specifically on ASARCO) Lin Nelson and Anne Fischel, “Public Health and Environment,” Their Mines, Our Stories, accessed December 20, 2017, ➝.

The story goes so far as to suggest that the lack of evidence for Nizhny Tagil’s role points to masonic involvement in the Statue’s facture (as secret societies were prohibited in Russia at the time). See Olga Zaikina, “Mining Lady Liberty’s Russian Lineage,” Hyperallergic, March 6, 2015, ➝. This article covers an exhibition called Skin of Liberty: Fractured and re-Structured, which brings artists from Brooklyn and Russia’s Ural region together to reflect on myths surrounding industrialization in the two cities.

Secrétan eventually owned a copper syndicate whose members included the powerful companies Rio Tinto, Anaconda, and Calumet & Hecla, all of whom became notorious for their harsh treatment of a sporadically restless and activist labor force.

Jean-Marie Welter, “Understanding the Copper of the Statue of Liberty,” JOM: A Publication of the Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society 58, no. 5 (May 2006): 30–33.

James Brooke, “Wealth of Mine Barons Turns to Dust at Source,” The New York Times, November 4, 1997, sec. U.S., ➝.

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 134.

Qtd. in Alan M. Kraut, “Lady in the Harbor: The Statue of Liberty as American Icon,” in Margaret Salazar-Porzio, Joan Troyano, and Lauren Safranek, eds., Many Voices, One Nation: Material Culture Reflections on Race and Migration in the United States (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), 127. Kraut also cites African American periodicals such as the Chicago Defender who continued to point out the Statue’s use in the service of “‘Liberty, Protection, Opportunity, Happiness, for All White Men’ and ‘Humiliation, Segregation, Lynching, for All Black Men.’”

See for instance United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition, 1876, Official Catalogue. Part III: Machinery Hall, Annexes, and Special Buildings. Department V. Machinery, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Centennial catalogue Company/John R. Nagle & Company, 1876), 6.

➝.

The financial responsibility proposal issued by the administration of President Barack Obama would have required companies mining metals such as gold, silver, copper and lead to show they had the financial means to clean up their sites once they finish mining by issuing bonds or buying insurance. It was aimed at taking the burden off of taxpayers to assume the cost of cleanup for sites when mines declare bankruptcy. See “EPA Passes on Rule Covering U.S. Hardrock Miners’ Cleanup Costs,” Reuters, December 2, 2017, ➝. See also Susan Dunlap, “Butte, Anaconda Bracing for Stripped-down EPA, Superfund,” Montana Standard, June 25, 2017, ➝.

The “Chicago Boys” were Latin American economists who held positions of power during the military dictatorship of Pinochet, named as such because they were either trained or influenced by University of Chicago theorists and proponents of free-market capitalism Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.

Qtd. in Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 318.

Text of a 1925 letter to client Gordon Strong, qtd. in Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 302. See also pp. 351-55.

See Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (Columbia University Press, 2015), 28-31. See also Peter Sloterdijk, Globes: Spheres, Volume 2: Macrospherology (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2014).

Dante Alighieri, Inferno 32.73-74, my translation. Los Angeles-based Chilean artist Ignacio Perez Meruane expresses the same intuition in Circuitos, a project entailing a spiral shelving system at the Galeria Tajamar in Santiago juxtaposing postcard views of the Guggenheim and Chuquicamata Mine, as well as copper bowls and verdigris-pigmented spiral paintings “to evoke copper’s extraction from the earth and subsequent movement as a material export, and the way in which the industrial use of the copper for the movement and transference of electricity, gas, liquids, and information, echoes the materials’ own movement across the globe.” See the press release at Ignacio Perez Meruane, “Circuitos,” Ignacio Perez Meruane, May 29, 2015, ➝. Ignacio Acosta also suggests a link, albeit in passing, describing the museum and the corporate town of Chuquicamata as “post-industrial archaeologies that resist forgiving their history of exploitation.” See Ignacio Acosta, “Urban Gating in Chile: Chuquicamata—a Corporate Mining Town: ‘Bounded Territory within a Territory,’” in Beyond Gated Communities, Ed. Samer Bagaeen and Ola Uduku (New York: Routledge, 2015), 234.

An exhaustive account of the Guggenheim empire and its branches would be impossible to include here. For a useful chart of the genealogy of their mining and smelting interests in 1910, see John H. Davis, The Guggenheims: An American Epic, 1st ed. (New York: Morrow, 1978), 94, and the following chapter, “Lords of the Earth (1905-1923): Building the Guggenheim Empire,” 95-134. Another accessibly narrated history appears in Debi Unger and Irwin Unger, The Guggenheims: A Family History (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); see especially pp. 69-99.

See Isaac Frederick Marcosson, Metal Magic: The Story of the American Smelting & Refining Company. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1949), 86-91. See also Leonard J. Arrington and Gary B. Hansen, The Richest Hole on Earth: A History of the Bingham Copper Mine (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1963). On the 1912 Bingham strike, which featured an unusual prominence of rank and file immigrant workers protesting both against immigrant elites or “padrones” and would-be union leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, see Gunther Peck, “Padrones and Protest: ‘Old’ Radicals and ‘New’ Immigrants in Bingham, Utah, 1905-1912,” The Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1993): 157–78.

Graham Bowley, “The Guggenheim Connection,” New York Times, September 17, 2011, ➝.

For a reading of open pit mining as a symbol of the ultimate pretension of technology’s ability to overcome all natural limits see Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009). The quote hails from LeCain, 119.

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 16.

Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 299. See Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association, 1936), 12.

Qtd. in Levine 346. Rebay thought red too “materialistic,” as Levine points out on 328.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 398. I am citing a translation modified by John Hamilton in an unpublished conference paper to which I was respondent: John Hamilton, “Burrowers, Builders, and the Principle of Insufficient Reason” (Habitation: Literature and Architecture, University of Chicago, 2016).

Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 39.

This situation was rectified with the nationalization of subsoil rights in 1917. See Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community, ed. William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies and Monica Perales (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 35.

Villa worked at ASARCO’s Smeltertown plant; and in January 1916, sixteen ASARCO employees were killed brutally by Villa’s men near the town of Santa Isabel, an incident that sparked the U.S. Army’s attempt to capture Villa. On Villa’s paradoxical collaboration with ASARCO see William K. Meyers, “Pancho Villa and the Multinationals: United States Mining Interests in Villista Mexico, 1913–1915,” Journal of Latin American Studies 23, no. 2 (May 1991): 346.

A.W. Allen, “The Chuquicamata Enterprise—III,” Mining and Scientific Press 123 (July 23, 1921): 121. See, for contrast, Alejo Gutiérrez-Viñuales, “Chuquicamata: Patrimonio Industrial de La Minería Del Cobre En Chile,” Apuntes: Revista de Estudios Sobre Patrimonio Cultural—Journal of Cultural Heritage Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 74–91.

Harry F. Guggenheim, “Building Mining Cities in South America: A Detailed Account of the Social and Industrial Benefits Flowing From the Human Engineering Work of the Chile Exploration Co. and the Braden Copper Co.,” Engineering and Mining Journal 110 (December 1920): 210.

Ibid.

Eulogio Gutiérrez and Marcial Figueroa, Chuquicamata, Su Grandeza y Sus Dolores (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1920), 10-11.

Guggenheim, “Building Mining Cities in South America,” 206.

It must be noted that a commission of government officials was sent to Chuquicamata and commented upon the deplorable and unhygienic qualities of the encampments, including the New Camp, which they judged to be “el más antihigiénico, insalubre e inadecuado de ver,” lacking water, electricity, and sewage, since the bathrooms were distant from the homes. See Elena Mayorga Marnich, "Sueño de una integración patrimonial o el traslado de Chuquicamata a Calama," Urbano 7, no. 10 (November 2004): 5. An analogy would be Fordlândia, Henry Ford’s would-be civilizing mission and rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle, recently engaged by Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin in Fordlândia Fieldwork (double-sided inkjet prints on paper, 2012).

Rivera’s immersive installation based on Chuquicamata’s disruptive impacts, The Andes Inverted, was on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from March 2017 through February 2018. See documentation at Rivera, “The Andes Inverted,” DANIELA RIVERA, ➝.

For more on the hard-won environmental policy change in Chile, and the gains for regulation of Chuquicamata, see José Carlos Orihuela, “The Environmental Rules of Economic Development: Governing Air Pollution from Smelters in Chuquicamata and La Oroya,” Journal of Latin American Studies 46, no. 1 (2014): 151–183.

“Cobre Rojo,” in Juan de Dios Reyes Franzani, Salitre: Poesía Joven del Norte (Antofagasta, Chile: Universidad del Norte, 1973), 6.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Gingko Press, 2013). eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost.

For a reading of Chuquicamata as an example of urban gating under transnational capital, see Ignacio Acosta, “Urban Gating in Chile: Chuquicamata—a Corporate Mining Town: ‘Bounded Territory within a Territory,’” in Beyond Gated Communities, Ed. Samer Bagaeen and Ola Uduku (New York: Routledge, 2015), 227–39.

For background, see Howard Jay Graham, Everyman’s Constitution: Historical Essays on the Fourteenth Amendment, the “Conspiracy Theory,” and American Constitutionalism (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1968). I have written more extensively about this issue in Jennifer Scappettone, “I 0we v. I/O: Poetics of Veil-Piercing on a Corporate Planet,” Jacket2, December 14, 2016, ➝.

He went on to say, "It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.” McLuhan, Understanding Media.

See the National Park Service’s account of the Statue’s links to abolition at National Park Service/U.S. Department of the Interior, “Abolition - Statue Of Liberty National Monument,” U.S. National Park Service, February 26, 2015, ➝.

Links in the chain were stolen from Vō’s installation of We the People (detail) between New York’s City Hall and Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2014, furthering the dispersion.

See Esther H. Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Knopf, 2017).

Heinrich Edward Jacobs, “The New Colossus,” in The World of Emma Lazarus (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 178.

John Higham, “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty,” in Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 80. Higham provides details surrounding the rhetoric of the statue’s unveiling on 81.

See United States Department of State, “Milestones: 1921–1936: The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),” Office of the Historian, ➝. Note that this website, “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations,” has been retired under the Trump administration.

See Hillel Italie, “Miller Comments on Lazarus Poem Echo Far-Right Opinions,” Associated Press News, August 3, 2017, ➝.

“Acosta’s Full Exchange with Stephen Miller,” CNN Video, August 2, 2017, ➝.