Oliver's Story

It took about a week to get to Oedipus.

Who has a palace on the Harvard campus: Barrett Hall.

'My family donated it to buy respectability.'

'Why?' Dr London asked.

'Because our money isn't clean. Because my ancestors were pioneers in sweatshop labor. Our philanthropy is just a recent hobby.'

Curious to say, I learned this not from any book about the Barretts, but … at Harvard.

When I was a college senior, I needed distribution credits. Hence along with hordes of others I took Soc. Sci. 108, American Industrial Development. The teacher was a so-called radical economist named Donald Vogel. He had already earned a place in Harvard history by interweaving all his data with obscenities. Furthermore, his course was famed because it was a total gut.

('I don't believe in blanking blanking blank examinations,' Vogel said. The masses cheered.) It would be an understatement to report the hall was packed. It overflowed with lazy jocks and zealous pre-med students, all in quest of lack of work.

Usually, despite Don Vogel's indigo vocabulary, most of us would get some extra zzz's or read the Crimson. Then one day, unfortunately, I tuned in. The subject was the early U.S. textile industry, a likely soporific.

'Blank, when it comes to textiles, many blanking "noble" Harvard names played very sordid roles. Take, for instance, Amos Brewster Barrett, Harvard class of 1794 … '

Holy shit — my family! Did Vogel know that I was out there listening? Or did he give this lecture to his mob of students every year?

I scrunched down in my seat as he continued.

'In 1814, Amos and some other Harvard cronies joined forces to bring the industrial revolution to Fall River, Massachusetts. They built the first big textile factories. And "took care" of all their workers. It's called paternalism. For morals' sake, they housed the girls recruited from the distant farms in dormitories. Of course the company deducted half their meager pay for food and lodging.

'The little ladies worked an eighty-hour week. And naturally the Barretts taught them to be frugal. "Put your money in the bank, girls." Guess who also owned the banks?'

I longed to metamorphose into a mosquito, just to buzz away.

Orchestrated by an even more than usual cascade of epithets, Don Vogel chronicled the growth of Barrett enterprise. He continued for the better (or the worse) part of an hour.

In the early nineteenth century, half the workers in Fall River were mere children. Some as young as five. The kids took home two bucks a week, the women three, the men a princely seven and a half.

But not all cash, of course. Part was paid to them in coupons. Valid only in the Barrett stores. Of course.

Vogel gave examples of how bad conditions were. For instance, in the weaving room, humidity improves the quality of cloth. So owners would inject more steam into their plants. And in the peak of summer, windows were kept closed to keep the warp and filling damp. This did not endear the Barretts to the workers.

'And dig this blanking blanking fact,' Don Vogel fumed. 'It wasn't bad enough with all the squalor and the filth — or all those accidents not covered by the slightest compensation — but their blanking pay went down! The Barrett profits soared and yet they cut the blanking workers' pay!

'Cause each new wave of immigrants would work for even less!

'Blank blank blanking blanking blank!'

Later that semester I was grinding in the Radcliffe Library. There I met a girl. Jenny Cavilleri, '64. Her father was a pastry chef from Cranston. Her late mother, T'resa Verna Cavilleri, was the daughter of Sicilians who had emigrated to … Fall River, Massachusetts.

'Now can you understand why I resent my family?'

There was a pause.

'Five o'clock tomorrow,' Dr London said.