Cementing Our Past
by Andrew Rieser, Ph.D.

Driven through Columbia County lately? If so, you've probably noticed a forest of red and blue signs sprouting along the road. Sorry, these aren't yard sales. Debates over the proposed St. Lawrence Cement Plant, once limited to lawyer's briefs, have spread to the grass roots of our front lawns. Every day, more people realize they are affected by the proposal. Everyone reading this article is, plus a few million more in the region. So, which are you: red or blue?

Thanks to the zealous public relations campaigns on both sides, few people in these parts are unaware of the project. Most now have heard about SLC's desire to shift operations from Catskill across the river to Hudson, where they own the rusting remains of United Atlas Cement's long abandoned mining operation. Most have heard something about the enormous scale of this $320 million project, which will include a two-mile conveyor system spanning Route. 9; a fourteen-acre shipping facility; a coal furnace with a 400-foot smokestack, producing a six-mile-long plume visible for fifty miles in every direction. Located far away from major population centers, so as to minimize public health concerns? Not quite. If built as planned, it would sit just one and a half miles from Hudson city limits—basically in the backyard of the 7,500 residents of the biggest city between Poughkeepsie and Albany.

Actually, make that 7,502. My wife and I moved to Hudson in November.

It didn't take long for us to choose sides. I'm a college history professor—thus, not directly dependent on heavy industry—so an anti-development, NIMBY point of view seemed like a natural fit. The plant was an audacious example of corporate greed, I concluded, a blight on a sacred landscape, a desecration of the valley's artistic and cultural traditions, and a threat to Hudson's downtown commercial revival. Every time I see one of those roadside red signs, insisting that SLC "Tell the Truth" and "Stop the Plant," it's as if my team has just scored. When I see the pro-plant blue signs ("Support the Planet," they say, bizarrely), I'm disheartened. We've considered putting a red one in our window to counter the blue one down the street. Go reds!

Alas, it is not that simple. Those "blues" are not irrational; they are not dupes of a multinational corporation; they are not desecrators of the sacred temple. Nor is the SLC plant as much of a departure from the region's historical traditions as plant opponents would have us believe. In fact, history is partially on their side, and the sooner the anti-plant forces acknowledge this, the better.

What bothers me about the anti-plant's version of history is how blatantly—well—bourgeois it can be. Opponents champion Frederick Church and the Hudson River School, whose adherents viewed nature as a sacred temple. Their romantic view of nature spurred the creation of parks and inspired future generations of environmentalists. Olana stands as a monument to this crucial aspect of the valley's—and our nation's—cultural heritage.

Fair enough. But let's not forget the social context. Such views were (and still are, to a degree) the prerogative of those wealthy enough not to be directly dependent on the very extractive industries—mining, timbering, railroads—that provided jobs to millions of poor immigrants from Europe. Not coincidentally, Church and his colleague Thomas Cole were notoriously suspicious of Andrew Jackson and the mass democratic -spirit he fostered. The captains of industry who vacationed in the Catskills and built grand riverfront palaces were trying to escape the common man, not embrace him. Only in the twentieth century have some middle-class people been able to afford the luxury of homes away from the teeming cities; many built second homes in the valley, and many have since decided to stay.

These waves of settlers brought their respect for the pastoral landscape, a nostalgia for simple village life, and an artist's appreciation of unspoiled nature. But they have also—and here I have to criticize myself as well—imported class prejudices that blinded them to the plight of both white and African-American workers whose families were devastated by the crumbling manufacturing base in the 1970s.

The working-class history of the Hudson valley is not irrelevant or marginal. Like it or not, mining, railroads, and manufacturing have played—and continue to play—crucial roles in the region. Mining near the City of Hudson dates to 1902, when the Hudson Portland Cement Company built a plant on the Hudson River. Mining operations expanded into limestone and shale in the 1930s, when Universal Atlas Cement, a division of U.S. Steel, bought the property. Until the 1950s, they produced stone for cement production with a jackhammer and dynamite—a time consuming and labor intensive process that employed hundreds of Hudsonites and helped them live the American dream.

Mechanization replaced jobs steadily in the 1950s and 1960s until 1974, when UAC shut down one of its kilns because of increased costs due to pollution control. Two years later, amidst a devastating recession, UAC closed down, leaving hundreds of unemployed workers, struggling families, rotting buildings, and dangerous brownfields (SLC promises to clean up the mess, by the way, but only if it is allowed to build a new plant which will cause even more pollution—I'm still trying to figure out that logic). Is this history of work, accomplishment, and struggle any less legitimate than the rarefied lineage of Frederick Church?

There is a battle underway over who gets to define the Hudson valley's "true" history. Ironically, it's a debate conducted largely among recent arrivals with an economic stake in the outcome. SLC did not arrive in Hudson until 1977; and some of those most passionate in opposition to the project arrived after that. Ultimately, the issue will move from the courts into the political realm. At that point, the "reds" will need as much support as they can find. Rhetoric that embraces a reverence for nature—but fails to acknowledge the class assumptions buried within that language—won't help. The "reds" need to acknowledge the legitimacy of those who are proud of the region's industrial heritage, and join with the "blues" in common cause against an industry that has served us all poorly.

Until then, go reds!

Andrew Rieser is Assistant Professor of history at Dutchess Community College, author of The Chautauqua Moment, and helps out with his wife's business, Everyday Wellness for Women, in Red Hook.