Refinery Town

by Steve Early

  The corporate counter-campaigns described herein have their roots in a California political struggle that occurred during the Great Depression. Eighty years before Big Oil tried to take down Richmond’s Green mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, and her city council allies, a Bernie Sanders–like socialist named Upton Sinclair faced similar business-funded, consultant-crafted attacks throughout the Golden State. The famous muckraking author was a political outsider who captured the Democratic Party nomination for governor in 1934 based on a forward-looking plan called End Poverty in California (EPIC).

  Sinclair centered his EPIC campaign on poor and working-class voters whose jobs, homes, or savings were disappearing. He proposed “production for use” rather than for profit, through worker co-ops and large-scale public job creation, which the Roosevelt administration had yet to embrace as a federal government response to the Depression. Republicans, conservative Democrats, and their corporate backers were horrified by Sinclair’s growing popular following. Kenneth R. Kingsbury, the president of Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) sent thousands of his shareholders a pamphlet predicting that “Sinclairism” would destroy property values, stock prices, and business in general.

  To prevent that, Standard Oil and other business clients turned to the country’s first professional political consulting firm, founded by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. The firm, Campaigns, Inc., employed traditional public relations techniques and innovative new approaches to mass communication and social persuasion. Like progressive candidates in modern-day Richmond, Sinclair was demonized and red-baited in a torrent of negative advertising. He was smeared in thousands of expensive billboards erected throughout the state.8 As historians including Jill Lepore report, Hollywood studios concocted scary anti-Sinclair newsreels—presented as actual reporting on his campaign—and screened them in movie theaters before feature films.9 To ruin Sinclair’s image among newspaper readers, Whitaker and Baxter combed his novels for controversial quotes from fictional characters and fed these snippets to reporters and columnists, who then attributed them to the author himself.

  After losing to incumbent GOP governor Frank Merriam (by only 250,000 votes out of two million cast), Sinclair penned a book-length postmortem on his gubernatorial race.10 In it he reflected on the mass media manipulation that discredited his proposals to reduce poverty and inequality and improve the quality of life in California. Over eighty years later, Whitaker and Baxter may be long dead but they have many successors in what is now a multibillion-dollar political consulting industry. In campaigns run against candidates, legislation, or referenda that might produce better government, fairer taxation, stronger environmental protection, or a healthier California, these “communication specialists” operate what Sinclair called a “lie factory.” The twenty-first-century result, even as measured by data-driven academics, is oligarchy, not democracy: “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”11

  In Refinery Town, we meet many such citizens, although not all of them are “average.” In fact, some are every bit as ornery and unorthodox in their views as Upton Sinclair. Following in the footsteps of earlier campaigners for social and economic justice, these activists have challenged the status quo, locally and nationally. In their serial bouts with corporate power, Richmond’s modern-day progressives have done more than adopt a defensive crouch. They have found ways to go on the political offensive, rallying friends and neighbors in the process. After lost rounds, in which they were pummeled badly, they rebounded and continued the fight.

  Refinery Town is by no means a comprehensive history of my new hometown or the final word on any number of important topics. Much of its subject matter—whether corporate political spending, industrial pollution, public safety reform, or housing affordability—could fill volumes. A sizeable body of existing literature on municipal reform, produced by journalists, academics, urban planners, and actual practitioners of city politics can be accessed in this book’s online bibliography.12 Some of my Richmond neighbors, especially those most immersed in public policy detail, may find my rendering of complex local disputes lacking in sufficient detail, subtlety, or historical sweep. On the other hand, some out-of-towners may feel at times like they’ve acquired more local knowledge than they need or want!

  I also realize that the particularity of Richmond could make this story seem overly exceptional. Hopefully, readers will find sufficient examples of citizen action that are timely, relevant, and reproducible elsewhere. Regardless of who occupies the White House, municipal reform movements like the one profiled in this book will remain a necessary vehicle for progressive activism. Over time, these efforts can help curb the decline in electoral participation that has left millions of poor and working-class Americans with little or no political voice.

  In national elections, those with the most donor clout—what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class”—are well positioned to win, whether their preferred candidate comes in first or second. Those of us dissatisfied with such outcomes have few short-term options other than expanded grassroots work in the trenches of local politics, labor organizing, or social movement building. As Sanders wound down his own 2016 presidential primary campaign, he strongly encouraged the first approach. “What we need,” he said, “is a 50-state strategy, which engages people—young and working class people—to stand up and run for school board, to run for city council, and the state legislature, so government, at all levels, starts listening to ordinary people instead of campaign contributors.”13

  Much citizen activism in the United States is already focused on local improvements—like community co-ops, bike paths, urban gardens, historical preservation projects, and other sustainability efforts. In Richmond, such urban landscape changes have occurred in the context of political insurgency. The manifestations of that, as reported here, have been controversial and much contested. But the many positive results so far pose this question: If a badly scarred industrial city, long dissed and dismissed by its upscale neighbors, can undergo a municipal renaissance, why not other less disadvantaged communities? I hope that this portrait of “Progressive Richmond,” warts and all, will provide inspiration and ideas for those attempting to remake their own hometowns, new and old.

  ONE

  A REFINER’S FIRE

  AS RECENT HOME BUYERS IN RICHMOND, my wife and I were not yet focused on Chevron’s historic intertwining with our new hometown. We acquired a surprisingly affordable home, just over the hill from a century-old refinery. The seller was a Chevron engineer headed for retirement in a San Diego condo. We noticed a disclaimer or two about our proximity to his former employer, but this legal notification was carefully buried in a big pile of standardized real estate agent and mortgage company paperwork that included a lot of other fine print.

  Like starry-eyed California gold seekers in the nineteenth century, our gaze was distracted from any possible downside to leaving stodgy old New England after thirty-two Boston-area winters. As our realtor joked, we were about to become residents of “the Richmond Riviera.” It had such a sunny, temperate Mediterranean-style microclimate that no one ever complained about anything—except possibly a neighbor with building plans that might obstruct a waterfront vista. Our own view of downtown San Francisco and Marin County landmarks like Mount Tamalpais was simply breathtaking.

  The only major piece of Chevron Corporation property visible between us and much pricier Marin was a 4,200-foot pier extending out into the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay. The 600-ton oil tankers unloading there, with their pumps humming away quietly, were often quite beautiful at night. Their illuminated superstructures made them look like carnival rides or a circus that had sailed into port from the Pacific, via the Golden Gate, whose famous bridge glittered farther off in the distance, between Angel Island and the Marin peninsula known as Tiburon.

>   On a bright, sunny August afternoon, six months after moving in, my wife was outside, tending to our new garden. A concerned neighbor across the street spotted her among the plants, opened her front door, and shouted: “You shouldn’t be outside! Don’t know you know there’s a ‘shelter in place’?”

  “What’s that?” Suzanne asked. She soon found out by looking up and over the hill behind our house, where an eruption worthy of Mount Vesuvius was underway. A major pipe rupture and fire had occurred at the Chevron refinery. Nineteen workers—the first responders to this emergency—narrowly escaped death at the scene of the accident. As the conflagration continued, a towering plume of toxic smoke spiraled up and then over much of downwind Richmond, reaching several other East Bay communities as well.

  For Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin, August 6, 2012, was turning out to be the day she and other local Greens had long warned about. Sitting down for dinner at her modest rental home a few miles away from Chevron, sixty-one-year-old McLaughlin started to get panicked calls from residents reporting that a huge dark cloud was hovering over them. Richmond police chief Chris Magnus soon confirmed the accident location, as did company officials calling from the scene of the fire.

  In Richmond, when fossil fuel disaster strikes, city hall issues an official order directing everyone affected to take cover in their own homes, a self-help procedure known as “sheltering in place.” Doors must be closed and windows taped shut, if possible. Under the ranking system used by Contra Costa County to calibrate its response to refinery emergencies, the Chevron fire was judged to be a Level 3 incident, the highest level of danger. Unfortunately, the county’s warning system did not quickly share this bad news. Robocalls to eighteen thousand nearby residents took many hours to complete, due to outdated software.

  Many area residents decided that “sheltering in place” wasn’t working well enough for them and headed for the nearest emergency room or clinic instead. About fifteen thousand sought medical treatment for respiratory complaints and other problems in the wake of the fire. Locking our doors and leaving gardening tools behind, my wife and I jumped into the car and sought refuge with friends in nearby Berkeley. That well-known university town, in neighboring Alameda County, had higher home prices and more distant bay views but fewer industrial neighbors like Chevron.

  The 2012 fire was not the first refinery accident to occur locally or in other parts of the globe where Chevron operates. But its dramatic scale, negative health effects, and adverse economic impact made it a modern milestone in Richmond’s often-fraught relationship with its biggest employer. The fire caused a $1.86 billion drop in the city’s assessed property values, reducing tax revenues from Chevron itself, other businesses, and homeowners. It revived long-standing concerns about Chevron’s environmental impact and workplace conditions. It stirred new restiveness about job safety among refinery workers whose union had waged a nearly hundred-year struggle for greater autonomy from the company. And, as Chevron spent heavily on public relations damage control, Richmond residents were subjected to many post-fire reminders of the company’s historical dominance of local affairs.

  As a forty-year veteran of labor and political organizing, I should have expected that a company with robber baron roots might have tangled with its own workers or downwind neighbors a few times before. Upon closer inspection, I learned that for much of the twentieth century, Richmond refinery bosses and lobbyists were skillful at winning local hearts and minds. To achieve its business goals, Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California) has employed more than a century’s worth of corporate paternalism, targeted philanthropy, slick publicity, and political patronage. During some past labor conflicts, a little picket-line repression was helpful too. The company’s modern-day game plan reflected the same sophisticated multifaceted approach it has used for decades.

  When Standard Oil opened for business in 1905, present-day Richmond consisted of grain fields, cattle farms, and a duck-hunting marsh adjacent to its low range of knolls rising from the bay. As California historian Gray Brechin notes, “Ohlone Indians once found the place so rich in food that they had, over thousands of years, built a gigantic pile of clam and mussel shells at the mouth of a creek there.”1 The Ohlones were long gone by 1900 when the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad arrived. Its workers built a tunnel and laid track to Ferry Point, making Richmond the site of San Francisco Bay’s second transcontinental railhead.

  In 1912, the San Francisco chamber of commerce sent a delegation across the bay, by ferry, to check out business opportunities in what Richmond’s founders hoped would become “the Pittsburgh of the West.” Their “trade excursion” took them to the highest point along the city’s thirty-two miles of still undeveloped shoreline. Looking east, they could admire not only one of the biggest refineries in the world but “the great car shops of Pullman, the Enterprise foundry, the plant of the Western Pipe and Steel Company of California . . . and other industrial concerns that have found cheap fuel, light and power, convenient transportation, and other favorable conditions.”2

  Within a few years, Richmond’s population neared ten thousand. Its roster of brand-name companies included American Radiator, Standard Sanitary, Stauffer Chemical, and the California Wine Association, which for a time operated the biggest winery and storage plant in the world on Richmond’s Point Molate. As Brechin points out, living downwind from so much manufacturing and refining was already becoming a problem for residents of West Contra Costa County and beyond because “the prevailing winds through the Golden Gate drove the smoke, ashes, and dust rich in heavy metals and asbestos, along with the stench of petrochemicals and acids, back upon the town.”

  Among Richmond’s nascent hazards was the little matter of explosions—and not just those occurring at Standard Oil. Forced out of San Francisco and Berkeley because of local concerns about the safety of its dynamite making, the Giant Powder Company relocated to Richmond’s Point Pinole. Between 1880 and 1960, two billion pounds’ worth of explosives were manufactured there, within the city limits. “This was the dynamite that helped build the west,” explains Point Pinole park ranger Dave Zuckerman, when he conducts tours of the 2,300-acre site today. “We like to say it was a ‘booming business.’”3

  Leading the industrial transformation of Richmond, Standard Oil started out small, on just six hundred acres, making kerosene for export to Asia. Soon there was no bigger refinery in the state and only two larger ones in the entire world. The facility was supplied by a 283-mile pipeline pumping crude to Richmond from the oil fields of Bakersfield, California, directly to the East Bay. Over time, oil pipelines, processing units, and storage tanks spread out over three thousand acres overlooking the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. Processing capacity today is 240,000 barrels of crude daily, which can generate as much as $25 billion in sales, 10 percent of the company’s worldwide total in recent years. The company now operates in 180 countries and is ranked sixteenth on Fortune’s Global 500 list. In 2014 it was number three on Fortune’s list of the five hundred top US corporations.

  WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINALS

  Standard Oil’s original owners, the Rockefeller family, were not particularly law-abiding or labor-friendly people. They were founding members of an industry that “has always been wealthy, powerful, and feudalistic.”4 The Rockefeller rap sheet includes major white-collar crimes and multiple homicides involving union members on family-owned properties. Federal antitrust action led to the breakup of the original Standard Oil trust in 1892, when founder John D. Rockefeller Sr. was still in charge.

  Two decades later the company regained “such monopolistic power that it was able to drive down the prices of crude oil it bought from producers on the one hand and drive up prices of products sold to consumers on the other hand.”5 The Supreme Court upheld a second divestiture of the family business. This reorganization created several dozen new companies, none of which remained smaller for long. Among them were the separate Standard Oils of New Jersey and New York (now reunite
d as Exxon-Mobil) and Standard Oil of California (later renamed Chevron).

  On picket lines from New Jersey to Colorado, Rockefeller-owned firms could be counted on to unleash deadly violence against striking workers. The murder of thirty-three coal miners and their family members on April 14, 1914, by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company—the Ludlow Massacre—was such a public relations disaster that John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired Ivy Lee, a pioneering corporate publicist and crisis communications handler, to buff up his personal and corporate reputation. But that didn’t stop similar killings of sixteen protesting workers, by police and hired gunmen, in Bayonne, New Jersey, during Standard Oil refinery strikes that occurred in 1915–16.

  Public revulsion turned John D. into a much-detested national figure. So the Rockefellers launched “a massive philanthropy campaign, donating large sums to various causes,” to refurbish the family’s image.6 In Richmond, this calculated community-mindedness was already underway in 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake sent refugees fleeing across the bay to Richmond’s Ferry Point. From there they were ushered to wooden dormitories in Rockefeller Camp, a haven for the homeless funded by a $100,000 donation from the Standard Oil founder.

  In other cities at the time, workers were turning away from corporate paternalism and charity toward political involvement. The Socialist Party attracted nearly one hundred thousand members, in part by challenging local business interests for control of city hall. As political scientist Peter Dreier reports, about twelve hundred socialists were elected to public office and used their municipal positions to improve services including housing, sanitation, and street repair. Socialist mayors presided over Minneapolis, Butte, Flint, Schenectady, and seventy-five other cities in twenty-four states.7