Bill Wolff

The Readings section of the February 2009 Harper’s (subscription required) has an excerpt from Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome,” that struck me as appropriate reading for today, a day when the nation is celebrating the inauguration of the first African-American president and the school semester started with discussions about the future of communication technologies and writing. In his address Obama observed:

Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor—who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

That recognition of the trials associated with the development of new frontiers, new technologies, new communication devices, is what Biss addresses in “Time and Distance Overcome” (and Harper’s calls “The War on Telephone Poles“—playing wonderfully, sardonically, on the word “on”). Recalling the chief of ABC’s incredulity of needing the domain abc.com, Biss reports:

“Of what use is such an invention?” the New York World asked in 1876 after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone. The nation was not waiting for the telephone. Bell’s financial backers asked him not to work on his invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspend ed from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far less likely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire. . . .

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. . . . The city council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ordered policemen to cut down all the telephone poles in town. And the mayor of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, ordered the police chief and the fire department to chop down the telephone poles there. Only one pole was chopped down before the telephone men climbed all the poles along the line, preventing any more chopping. Bell Telephone Company stationed a man at the top of each pole as soon as it had been set, until enough poles had been set to string a wire between them, at which point it became a misdemeanor to interfere with the poles. Even so, a constable cut down two poles holding forty or fifty wires. And the owner of a cannery ordered his workers to throw dirt back into the hole the telephone company was digging in front of his building. His men threw the dirt back in as fast as the telephone workers could dig it out. Then he sent out a team to dump a load of stones into the hole. Eventually the pole was erected on the other side of the street.

Eventually, as it often does, the telephone won out (the telephone pole being a new technology, it won out, too), when “Rutherford B. Hayes pronounced the installation of a telephone in the White House ‘one of the greatest events since Creation.’ The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, ‘annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.'” The telephone pole, upon which the telephone’s wires hung and through which the voices of a nation began to spread, much like the fiber-optic cables the Internet zips through today, wiped away distances and connected people.

Yet, there is a darker side of the telephone pole, that inert wooden former tree sitting along the road that I should have guessed:

In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Holdenville, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was “riddled with bullets.” In Danville, Illinois, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. A black man was hung from a telephone pole in Belleville, Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man was cut down half alive, covered in coal oil, and burned. While his body was burning, the mob beat it with clubs and cut it to pieces.

Continue reading →