On Friday, October 8, the Institute for Legal Studies of the University of Wisconsin Law School presents "Owning Hazard in the Modern American Workplace", an experimental play by Barbara Young
Welke, Professor of History and Law at the University of Minnesota. The play will be at the Chazen Museum Auditorium, L140, from 3:30-4:45 p.m. located at 800 University Avenue in Madison.
About the play:
Although
it was common enough prior to the 1940s to read in the newspaper about
someone – most often a child or a woman – who was seriously injured or
burned to death when their clothing caught fire, “flammable fabrics”
first became a public issue in the United States with the cowboy suit
tragedy in the 1940s and early 1950s. Between 1942 and 1953, an untold
number of children across the United States were severely burned when
the Gene Autry cowboy suits they were wearing caught fire turning them
into “human torches.” A number of children died, others were left with
grotesque scars and crippled for life. Between 1945 and 1953, at least
one hundred families brought lawsuits against those involved in the
manufacture and sale of the cowboy suits and their component parts.
Only one of these cases -- McCormack v. M. A. Henry Co., Inc. -- brought
in state court in New York, was tried. When the court reached a
verdict against the defendants, they scrambled to settle other cases as
quietly as possible and worked to limit publicity relating to the
accidents and settlements. In 1953, in large measure because of the
cowboy suit tragedy, Congress passed the Flammable Fabrics Act, followed
in 1967 by a substantial broadening of the act and in 1972, by a second
set of amendments applying specifically to children’s sleepwear. The
combination of private lawsuits and legislation reshaped significant
segments of the clothing industry; it did not though bring an end to the
production and sale of flammable fabrics.
About the author:
Barbara
Young Welke is Professor of History and Law at the University of
Minnesota. She is the author of Recasting American Liberty: Gender,
Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge University
Press 2001) which was awarded the AHA’s Littleton-Griswold Prize, and
Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United
States, the inaugural book in the New Histories of American Law series
edited by Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge
University Press 2010). She is currently working on a play and two book
projects related to the history of product liability in the United
States. In 2007 and 2009, she chaired the Hurst Summer Institute in
Legal History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She will be
chairing the Hurst Summer Institute for a final time in June 2011.
Author's comments:
"My goal is to
deliberately disrupt narrative, to provoke questions not simply about
“what happened?” but about the larger questions that the example here of
flammable fabrics raises about owning hazard. I am a historian, not a
playwright, so this venture is decidedly experimental. The format is
intended to take apart evidence that in the scholarly endeavor becomes
reduced to a seamless narrative or marshaled in support of a particular
argument, to restore to the reader/viewer a role in the interpretive
process, to entertain divergent readings. Finally, I wanted to consider
how one might combine the visual and performative in legal history."
Submitted by Ruth Robarts, Assistant Dean for Student & Academic Affairs on October 5, 2010
This article appears in the categories: Announcements
