A Certain Oil Refinery

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.