“History Lives in Us Whether We Learn it or Not”
Such reads an engraved inscription in “The Perpetuity Wing,” a museum of the history of Lumen, the omnipotent corporate power that rules over the fictional world of Severance. It’s a truism that winners write the history books; not only winners of wars fought on battlefields with formal rules, but – what’s easier to forget – winners of colder wars. After all, in this world and in the parallel reality of Severance, popular American history is told from the point of view of major corporations. Some of the numerous ways this happens will be covered in future posts, but in this three-part series, I focus on the popular history of work and Lumen’s industrial aristocrats, the Eagan family.
Lumen’s founder, Kier Eagan, a gilded age captain of industry, depicted as a self-made man, with an image somewhat like Andrew Carnegie, fits the Horatio Alger model of virtue made rich. The imagery of the period, including didactic history painting favoured to depict nation building, is used to instill Lumen’s values. The museum itself is an institution which proliferates during the 19th century, and its development is tied to colonialism and the notion of progress. In the US, the post-civil war period is known as “The Gilded Age,” after Mark Twain’s novel, which, although fictional, documents the rise of American capitalism and its attendant political corruption, con-artistry, dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the destruction of the environment at a rapid pace. In other words, America’s whole economy is built on confidence tricks and theft. “[M]uch wealth,” Twain writes, is merely “bubble[s] of credit and speculation.” While not unbiased himself, Twain illuminates the preoccupations of the post-war period: many of the characters, no longer in possession of slaves, puzzle over how to convince people to do the real work to enable their get-rich-quick schemes without fairly compensating them.
One of the most popular scams defines the era: the mid-19th century to the early 20th century is also sometimes called the patent medicine era, so it’s no surprise that Lumen industries gets its start in this field with a simple salve (or ointment). Patent medicine, AKA ‘snake oil,’ could be purchased through the mail as well as from travelling salespeople and stationary vendors. Often of dubious efficacy, it combined folk medicine with business. Incidentally, Elizabeth Holmes, a scam-made billionaire of today, is descended from the founders of a company (Fleischmann’s) which emerged in gilded age America and succeeded in part on the basis of the types of unproven health claims common to patent medicines. (Although its Wikipedia page has since been scrubbed of the company’s history of dubious health claims, you can find some information about it here.) Incidentally, Holmes won the 2015 Horatio Alger award. The awarding body’s official website states that winners “traditionally have started life in ‘humble’ or economically challenging circumstances”; a definition which makes Holmes a very non-traditional candidate. However, the ideology of American work ethic is rife with such contradictions.
During the gilded age, many of the most powerful corporations – like Fleischmann’s – were born or entered their full power, never to be reduced. Most notably, J.P Morgan and Coca-Cola. Foreign companies, like the Swiss Nestle, began to expand and establish factories in the US. Today, these corporations are rarely thought of as nationally based – they have become global superpowers.
This isn’t the beginning, of course, but it is a key turning point.
But corporations didn’t just win the war for capital – they won the war for hearts and minds. Corporate propaganda latched onto American values like hard work and right living. The prosperity gospel gets its start in the late 19th century, which some see as an extension of Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic (it should be noted that Weber’s popular theory is controversial, however, and there are detractors). The notion that following the habits of the wealthy will lead us likewise into wealth has a long history, and Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most well-known example. An icon of independence, self-reliance, and personal productivity, Benjamin Franklin’s productive and healthful lifestyle is rarely thought of as dependant on the slaves he owned, the servants he employed, or the woman he made his wife. The current trend favouring productivity ‘experts’ retains a male bias, focusing on a specific type of productivity removed from care work (much as severed employees are unencumbered by family or other personal concerns). Despite these obvious oversights common to productivity advice from Franklin to the ‘productivity hack’ obsessions of today, the idea that right living and extracting as much productivity from yourself as possible will lead to riches is a popular one – one which Elizabeth Holmes’ now-public to-do lists participate in. It is tempting to believe we have so much power as individuals. And what better way to increase productivity and efficiency than to sever our working lives from our private complaints?
As we aim to make ourselves into efficient machines, we have become adept at controlling and re-designing our bodies. The design of the severed office and the stylized retro dance parties harken back to the 50s and 60s era of “better living through chemistry” that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring called into question (If you’re not familiar with her story, this is a great introduction). Patent medicine gave way to Big Pharma, and Lumon’s humble salve builds Lumon industries, a leading biotechnology company – not an uncommon corporate geneaology. Mid-20th century, progress meant a pill for everything and complete mastery over nature, including our own bodies –in the service of industry and productivity, of course. Today, many illnesses are still reported to us as causes of lost (corporate) productivity; likewise, many causes of lost productivity are rebranded as illnesses.
There are two regular motifs in political cartoons of the gilded age: the ominous octopus and the fat businessman, usually smoking a cigar. The first represents the growing power of a few enormous corporations (like Lumen), their tentacles grasping at everything. The second represents the human equivalent (Kier Eagen).
This was also an era which saw Pinkerton detectives and police forces, on behalf of these fat men and their grasping molluscs, violently breaking up strikes. There were numerous instances of attempts to recover the lost labour of slavery through enslaving Eastern European and Italian immigrants in forced labour camps and peonage villages. This problem of labour expense is essentially common knowledge, perhaps first depicted by Twain, and entering the public consciousness with Margaret Mitchell’s later depictions of the prison system replacing antebellum slavery in Gone with the Wind. Although depictions of this struggle to extract labour for little to nothing seems to peak around the turn of the century, in reality, this struggle for cheap labour never ends. The fictional Eagans have discovered a way to accomplish this successfully in a parallel universe – who has done in it this one?
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