A Certain Oil Refinery

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting Links
Short video: Thomas Edison's film of the destruction by fire of Standard Oil Company's plant at Bayonne, N.J., on July 5th, 1900 (Library of Congress)

The Dreiser Web Source (University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

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1047 pages • 80 pages of photographs, many in full color

Bayonne, New Jersey, refinery complex in 1890. Engraving from King's Hand-book of the United States.

In the anthology Writing New York, Phillip Lopate observes:

When Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York in 1894, he found “the city of my dreams” and explored it avidly, fascinated by its sharp contrasts. In his first masterpiece, Sister Carrie (1900), and his later Frank Cowperwood trilogy, he portrayed New York as a Social Darwinist winnowing machine, elevating some to the top while pushing others under.

In addition to his more famous works of fiction, Dreiser wrote a series of newspaper sketches about his adopted home, and he collected some of them in The Color of a Great City. One of the pieces, first published in 1919, takes his readers on a tour of the Standard Oil works, located in Bayonne, New Jersey, which on a clear day could be seen across New York Bay from the south side of Brooklyn. Dreiser’s Social Darwinism is on full display here, contrasting the mansions of Fifth Avenue with the “wretched” conditions of the industrial purgatory populated by men “of an order which you would call commonplace.” His article says little of the work itself (“You can find the how of it in any encyclopedia”) and instead focuses on the toxic filth and foul odor of the Bayonne refinery—reminding us that the societal and environmental costs of America’s hunger for oil are a century old.

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There is a section of land very near New York, lying at the extreme southern point of the peninsula known as Bayonne, which is given up to a peculiar business. . . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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