Plastic Before Plastic
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
Most American students learn in high school about the 1856 “caning” of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks. Teachers love the incident because it serves as a tidy encapsulation of so many themes from that period of American history.
The attack stemmed, like so many problems in the 1850s, from the dispute over slavery. Sumner was a fierce abolitionist who had recently given an aggressive speech opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In that speech, he attacked Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina in personal and sexually charged language designed to remind listeners of the sexual violence that many slaveowners perpetrated on their slaves:
The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave S…
