The Racist History of Telephone Poles

According to Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome,” anywhere a telephone pole was set to be put up, there were homeowners and business owners ready to saw them right back down. It was what the New York Times called a “War on Telephone Poles” in 1889. They didn’t want them because they were ugly, a nuisance to the eye that seemed to grow from the ground in a misshapen, barren kind of way, a tree born dead that sprouted multitudes of warped, deranged limbs that stretched beyond any distances than were ever before imaginable. Biss also comments on the deeper issue that the poles brought about: this age-old American fear for “private property and a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility.” Americans, in the rise of the telephone poles, were not strictly fighting for the aesthetics of their country, but for the ideology that collectivity was the downfall of the American way. <a href="https://medium.com/@cwb307/the-racist-history-of-telephone-poles-8cd859b99d65">Read More</a>