CHAPTER 20
COMPANY TOWN
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
—Aesop
Most people think that the company town is a creature of industrial yore—Detroit in the heyday of General Motors; Pittsburgh after the merger of Carnegie and U.S. Steel; Pullman, Illinois, in the days of the luxury sleeper car; and Hershey, Pennsylvania, the fantasia of chocolate. None of those monopolies survived the economic dislocations and sociopolitical transformations of the twentieth century. The less notable company towns, too—the coal towns and lumber towns and mining towns scattered across the rural American landscape—died away as the country grew more educated and mobile, as opportunity expanded from coast to coast.
Not so in agriculture.
In the last half century, the company town has made a quiet comeback, thanks to the hyper-consolidation of the Big Ag conglomerates and the near-slavish dependency of contract farmers on the market systems controlled by them. This is the dynamic that turned the old tobacco lands between Raleigh and Wilmington into Murphysville. And hog country is not alone. There are echoes of this same Oz-like influence in rural territories across the American heartland, from the plains of Oklahoma and Nebraska up through the Mississippi River Valley into Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. In these places, the fortunes of countless people, and the towns they love, rise and fall on the whims of a single agribusiness corporation, or a tightly knit group of them, whether the industry be pork or chickens, turkey or beef.
Rarely, however, has one company amassed enough influence to take the reins of an entire state legislature. In the spring of 2017, however, Smithfield Foods makes a play for the North Carolina General Assembly. Its goal is singular and undisguised: to drive a stake through the heart of the nuisance suits before Mona Wallace and Mike Kaeske can seat the first jury in Judge Britt’s courtroom.
The agitators who lead the advance in Raleigh are the same ones who championed the Right to Farm amendment before the suits were even filed: Brent Jackson, the state senator and food broker turned majordomo of Big Pork, and Jimmy Dixon, the Republican firebrand from Duplin, with the ham-hock visage and the ivory duckbill bouffant.
As in 2013, they have partisan allies in every crack and crevice of the General Assembly. The Republicans hold a supermajority in the House, 75 seats to 45 for the Democrats, and in the Senate, 35 seats to 15, which means that, even though the new governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat, his veto is ceremonial. In the last legislative session, the Republican supermajority achieved a measure of global notoriety—infamy, to many—with its transgender bathroom bill. Put simply, the party of Jackson and Dixon can do whatever it damn well pleases.
On March 23, 2017, the same day that the discovery period closes in all five cases slated for trial, Jimmy Dixon introduces a bill in the state House that would put a choke hold on the kinds of damages available to plaintiffs in farm nuisance suits. It would also, in a provision without precedent, apply to existing litigation.
The clerk gives it the name HB467.
On the plaintiffs’ side, Bill Graham, Mona’s partner, is the first to hear about it. He has ears on the ground in the General Assembly, friends and associates he collected during his erstwhile run for governor. He learns of the bill, in fact, before Jimmy Dixon makes it public. His people inform him that the industry is throwing everything behind it, and that they have support from the leadership.
A few days after the bill is introduced, Graham takes a trip to Raleigh and makes his rounds in the General Assembly. No door is closed to him, no politician out of reach. He’s a gifted glad-hander with golden boy good looks and Hollywood charisma. Tall and trim, with a frame that compliments a suit, he has a smile that seems to sparkle and a down-home twang as smooth as a glass of Pappy. Like Mona, he’s a phenomenally successful lawyer. But he has never lost touch with his roots. He spent his formative years in rural Harnett County and worked in a cotton mill while putting himself through college. He knows what it’s like to prune tobacco and ride a combine, clean looms and blow down HVAC systems. Some people look at him and see a silver spoon. But Bill Graham wasn’t born to privilege. He’s a country boy at heart.
He finds Jimmy Dixon huddling with the Speaker of the House, Tim Moore, in the office of David Lewis, the House representative from Harnett County and one of the co-sponsors of HB467. He knows the storyline that Dixon has been spreading around, that he and Mona and Mike Kaeske and Lisa Blue are painting a bull’s-eye on the little guy, putting the squeeze on the state’s hardworking family farmers. Graham is a card-carrying Republican. He understands what makes Lewis and Moore tick—their conservative economic principles, their suspicion of regulations, regulatory agencies, and trial lawyers. Dixon he’ll never convince. The man has been in the industry’s back pocket for years. He’s taken $115,000 in political donations from the big integrators and other industry-aligned groups—a heady sum, given how inexpensive it is to run a state House race in hog country. But the others are still in play.
Jimmy Dixon’s greeting isn’t kind: “You guys are just after money.”
Graham summons his most reasonable tone. “Every civil suit has a claim for monetary damages. But that’s not what this is about. Some of your constituents have been harmed.”
Dixon, however, is itching for a fight. He launches into a condescending lesson about the hardships of life on a farm.
Eventually, Graham grows tired of the harangue. “I’ve got an idea, Representative Dixon. Why don’t you let me tell you what it’s like to work in a cotton mill? What difference does that make? These people were harmed. You need to do the right thing.”
When Dixon just stares at Graham bug-eyed, the Salisbury lawyer glances at Lewis and Moore, making sure they’re paying attention. “If we win—which is a big ‘if,’ at this point—none of these farmers you’re talking about will be paying the freight. It’s going to be the Chinese. They’re the ones calling the shots. Why are you protecting them?”
Dixon ignores the question, though later in the press he will use Graham’s reference to Smithfield’s Chinese owners to accuse Mona and Bill of seeking a windfall of foreign cash. Rather, Dixon tries to flip the script. “Why’d you really file all these lawsuits?” he asks.
Graham smiles. “You don’t know?” It’s exactly the opening he was looking for. With Lewis and Moore watching, he lets Dixon have it.
“Jimmy,” he says, “let me break this down for you. These people tried back in the nineties to get the government’s attention. That didn’t go anywhere. They tried the local government. They tried the county government. They tried the state government. They tried the federal government. They tried everything. And you know what? When you wear out your welcome in the legislative branch, and you wear out your welcome in the executive branch, the courthouse is the only place left to go.” Dixon’s lips stretch into a pale scar, but Bill Graham isn’t finished. “These people are powerless. We know what the industry did. Look at where the farms are. Almost all of our clients are Black.”
When Bill Graham puts race on the table, the conversation plunges off a cliff. Dixon won’t even engage the point, and Graham is smart enough to walk away. In the days to come, the Duplin politician will fall all over himself denying that the largest concentration of hog CAFOs are in low-income communities of color. He will never admit that this story is about civil rights. In his mind, it’s about family farmers and greedy trial lawyers.
And he, Jimmy Dixon, is on the side of the right.
With the hog barons storming the legislature, it isn’t long before Mona Wallace joins Bill Graham on the field. The same week that Bill meets with Jimmy Dixon, Mona gets a call about HB467 from Leigh Lawrence, legislative aide to Representative Billy Richardson.
Billy is a practicing attorney, a veteran politician, and the child of parents who embodied the spirit of social justice. His father, a banker, hired the first Black manager at his bank. His mother, a guidance counselor and self-proclaimed “radical,” rescued kids from abusive situations and put them up in Billy’s room. Many of these kids were Black. As a state representative from Fayetteville, Billy understands Smithfield’s game. He sees the strategy that its sponsors and lobbyists have adopted.
He vows to oppose them with everything he has.
Billy also happens to be a fan of Mona Lisa Wallace. To him, she’s a “national treasure.” He urges Mona to talk to Skip Stam, a former Republican legislator and one of the savviest constitutional scholars in the state. Billy thinks that property rights might be the key to defeating HB467. While the Republicans hold a supermajority in the General Assembly, the most conservative wing of the GOP is as zealous about guarding home and caste as they are about opposing abortion and transgender rights. If Mona can convince Skip Stam to lend a hand and frame the debate in those terms, some of the Republicans might break ranks with Jackson and Dixon and aid the Democrats in scuttling the bill.
With the House Judiciary Committee scheduled to take up HB467 in mere hours, Mona drives through the pouring rain to meet Stam at his office near Raleigh. He’s intrigued by the bill, especially Jimmy Dixon’s attempt to apply it retroactively to the lawsuits. He’s a lawyer’s lawyer, the kind of guy who gets a rush cracking open a centuries-old law book and searching for insight.
To ground his thinking about the bill, Stam defaults to Blackstone—naturally. As Mona waits patiently across his desk, Stam dusts off a volume from the legendary jurist’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and consults the entry for “nuisance.” His eyes light up. It turns out that the seminal nuisance case in the English common law is about hogs.
Way back in 1610, a man named William Aldred claimed that his neighbor, Thomas Benton, had erected a pigsty too close to his property, such that the stench from the hogs made his house unbearable to live in. The judges on the King’s Bench found in Aldred’s favor, holding that “an action on the case lies for erecting a hogstye so near the house of the plaintiff that the air thereof is corrupted.” The court wrote that a man has “no right to maintain a structure upon his own land, which, by reason of disgusting smells, loud or unusual noises, thick smoke, noxious vapors, the jarring of machinery, or the unwarrantable collection of flies, renders the occupancy of adjoining property dangerous, intolerable, or even uncomfortable to its tenants.”
Stam is delighted by this discovery, and Mona is delighted by his delight. He tells her that the retroactivity provision in HB467 is unconstitutional. He’s fought battles like this before. It is one thing to tweak the law in a way that will apply to cases down the road, another thing to reach back in time and pluck vested rights out of the hands of people who have relied on them. It’s especially egregious to pilfer rights from plaintiffs in the middle of a lawsuit to shield a favored industry from sanction. It’s crony capitalism and legislative capture at their worst.
There is also the minor problem of precedent. With HB467, Smithfield and its minions are taking aim at four hundred years of common law. They want nothing less than to rewrite the definition of nuisance to prevent the neighbors of an agricultural operation from recovering a jury award commensurate with the harm. They want to shrink the broad concept of damages in a nuisance case to the loss of property value alone.
To a bewigged traditionalist like Skip Stam, this is sacrilege. It doesn’t matter that he’s a Republican. If the King’s Bench and William Blackstone say that people have the right to clean air, then, by God, people have the right to clean air. He’s all in.
A couple of days later, Stam works up a “Dear Colleague” letter enumerating the flaws in the bill and emails it to the chairs of the House Judiciary Committee. The following morning, he and his wife board a flight to France. Little does he know that the furor he has just unleashed will follow him across the Atlantic.
Back at the statehouse, the pork industry’s favorite surrogate, Jimmy Dixon, is laboring tirelessly to advance the bill to the floor. At his behest, the Judiciary Committee takes it up less than a week after it is introduced. The bill’s opponents are just as well organized. They come out in droves, packing the committee room in open rebellion against Dixon and the hog lobby. Elsie Herring is there, along with Randy Davis, a white plaintiff from Don Webb’s group. Larry Baldwin is there representing the Waterkeeper Alliance, as is Naeema Muhammad from NCEJN. Even John Hughes and Bill Graham make the trip over from Salisbury. The show of force puts the brakes on Dixon’s runaway train. Instead of transmitting the bill to the full House without delay, the committee is forced to debate and deliberate.
Dixon, who has a flair for the grandiose, leads with a quote from Abe Lincoln. The quote itself—that politicians have to pay attention to farmers because farmers constitute the largest voting bloc in the electorate—is obsolete in 2017, but Dixon adapts it for his purposes. “Farmers no longer cast the most votes. But guess what, Ladies and Gentlemen? Farmers still feed everybody that votes. And if there’s anyone in here who believes that food comes from the grocery store, line up after this and I’ll give you a spanking. Food comes from farms.”
Dixon then pleads the bill’s merits. It isn’t about reining in punitive damages, he says. It’s about reining in the trial lawyers. As he tells it, the lawyers suing Smithfield are only interested in extorting a settlement. He recounts a story about his “good friends” at Prestage and Goldsboro, two of the integrators still standing, who were sued in Mississippi and Indiana and won in court, but were left with “exorbitant” legal fees. This is the sort of egregious legal abuse that HB467 will help prevent.
It’s a serviceable speech. But the audience is savvy enough to see through the ruse. It turns out that the precise species of damages that Jimmy Dixon wants to toss in the dustbin are the only damages that the plaintiffs are claiming in court. In an effort to streamline the litigation, Mona’s team agreed to waive compensation for lost property value and seek only “annoyance and discomfort” damages—the plaintiffs’ lost quality of life. Shortly after Mona and Mike cemented this commitment, Dixon introduced HB467. Were the bill to be enacted as written, the damages that Elsie Herring and Randy Davis and Don Webb and their five hundred co-plaintiffs could claim from any jury verdict would be reduced to zero. That would be true of punitive damages too. In North Carolina, punitive damages are capped at three times compensatory damages. And, as any second grader knows, three times zero is zero.
Dixon also has the sympathy equation inverted. The true combatants in the litigation aren’t the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the farmers who feed America. It’s ordinary homeowners—his constituents—arrayed against a global corporation owned by Chinese plutocrats. But telling the truth about the war would complicate Dixon’s legislative enterprise. So he omits the plaintiffs and the hog company from his story, and he reacts indignantly when some on the committee suggest that Smithfield’s billionaire owners can foot the legal bill.
“I’m going to use an inordinate amount of restraint,” he says. “These sixty-nine farms, these people are red-blooded, hardworking Americans that have clawed to get to where they are at. These people cannot be separated, and to put forth the proposition that it’s fair because it is a Chinese-owned company and they can afford it…We are looking at what is fair, not what a company can afford.”
The first citizen to address the committee, a nurse from Winston-Salem, raises the banner for the neighbors. “What is the fair market value of a person’s life?” she asks. “Their peace of mind; the right to enjoy the property they worked hard for and saved for or inherited from their grandparents. We quoted Abraham Lincoln; why don’t we quote Moses? ‘And the Lord breathed into him the breath of life.’ If we are talking air, we are talking life.”
Larry Baldwin of the Waterkeeper Alliance takes the critique up a notch. “The CAFO industry is one of the most insidious industries that I know of. Their tactics, the things that they do to their communities, particularly African Americans, communities of color, low income, Hispanic, Native Americans…This is about race. This bill has got to go. It is not about protecting people. It is about protecting the industry.”
Eventually, Elsie Herring steps up to the microphone. She’s done this so many times before, told the story of her mother’s land, the way the hog farmer poisoned it and siphoned joy from Beulah’s final years. She isn’t intimidated by the powerful men behind the dais, by the judgment she sees in their eyes. And she definitely is not afraid of Jimmy Dixon.
“My name is Elsie Herring,” she says in a voice strong and steady. “I come from Duplin County. ‘Hog Heaven.’ We have over 2.2 million hogs in our communities. We tried every avenue available to us to bring attention to the conditions we’ve been forced to live under. And we are forced to live with animals and their waste. This has been ongoing for decades now. By this bill being presented, it is taking away the last hope that we have.”
Other speakers come after her, all opposed to the bill. But Jimmy Dixon is unfazed. He will never give credence to the complaints of people like Elsie. In another setting, he will suggest that the plaintiffs are confused, at best, and mendacious, at worst. He will never concede that the Murphy men have made the lives of hundreds of his Black neighbors a living hell. He is a company man like Don Butler, as firm in his loyalties as if he were on Smithfield’s payroll. But he is not in charge of the General Assembly. There is an order to the work of the legislature, a way the sausage gets made. And that’s the way Jimmy Dixon plays.
The Judiciary Committee tables the bill and sets another hearing for the following week. What happens next, however, doesn’t bear much resemblance to the business of government.
It looks like P. T. Barnum has taken up residence in the statehouse.