Home > Rust & Rage in the Heartland
by DALE MAHARIDGE
Working meant sparks and steel dust when I was a child.
My father labored by day in a factory sharpening the
milling tools that cut and form metal; after dinner he
descended into our basement and a battery of machines,
doing the same work as a side business. At age 12 I
began grinding steel. I was on track to make this my
living. Then I began writing and left blue-collar life.
But I couldn’t really leave it behind.
I was there for the steel-mill shutdowns in the late
1970s and later collaborated on Journey to Nowhere,
about ruined steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, and the
new homeless who were the victims of
deindustrialization. One character in the book was Joe
Marshall Sr., who had come back from the D-Day Normandy
invasion to his job at US Steel’s Ohio Works. A decade
after his son was hired on, the company closed the mill
and then dynamited it. Joe took us to the mile-long
ruins in 1983. As he surveyed the rubble he said, "What
Hitler couldn’t do, they did it for him."
Joe spoke to the wind, not in response to any question
of mine. It was a comment not of rage but of defeat, a
sentiment we found among many others we documented.
Despair was the norm.
A dozen years later, my collaborator, photographer
Michael Williamson, and I returned to Youngstown, and
traveled again across America. What was different, and
startling, was the level of anger that we discovered.
Defeat had morphed into wrath. In Warren, Ohio, there
had just been a strike at a steel mill over a plan to
sell it, which would have incurred debt and might have
led to its shutdown. Homemade bombs were thrown and
windows smashed in a fury. Some workers said they would
have dynamited the blast furnace had they lost,
effectively killing the mill. "Blowing it up would be
better than going through that again," a worker said as
someone gave me one of their bombs from the successful
fifty-four-day strike, referring to the other shutdowns
they had endured in nearby Youngstown.
Everywhere, we listened to people equally as bitter as
the men of Warren—people who worked in textiles or the
service economy. But what did the anger mean? It just
seemed to be flailing, unfocused, drifting like the
smoke from the bomb in the desert wind after we
detonated it in the Mojave near old US Route 66. Even
the full-band version of the song "Youngstown"—which
Bruce Springsteen credits with having been inspired by
our book—ends not with the steelman rising politically
but simply eschewing heaven for the "fiery furnaces of
hell."
Then came the morning that I watched the second tower
go down from my Manhattan rooftop. I looked to the west
beyond the New Jersey Palisades. I thought of the anger
in the middle of the country. Beginning on Christmas
Eve, I spent the next two and a half years largely in
the nation’s center. I drove thousands of miles and
talked with hundreds of people. I went specifically to
the places and people and events ignored by the
national press.
What I found was that anger had now combined with fear,
and together they had become a dangerous brew. Fear
alone, of another terror attack, is a strong force in
American politics. But fear connected with anger is an
especially volatile combination. The 9/11 attacks were
not solely the genesis but an amplifier of pre-existing
tensions—rooted in the radically transformed American
economy, from a manufacturing dynamo to that of
millions of jobs of the Wal-Mart variety. One cannot
displace millions of workers from high-paying jobs to
low ones without a sociopolitical cost. It’s a
fundamental reality that was ignored during the rise of
the so-called new economy.
Prick the anger whose surface may be pro-Iraq war and
anti-Arab, dismissive of Abu Ghraib, and one hears of
ruined 401(k)s, poor or no healthcare, lost work. There
are 1 million fewer jobs today than when George Bush
took office, and the loss of higher-paid manufacturing
jobs has been stunning.
Where this mood will lead is unclear, but it cannot be
overlooked by anyone concerned about the future of the
United States.
On the first anniversary of 9/11 I went to a mosque in
Chicago and found a smaller repeat of what had happened
for three nights after the attacks, when thousands of
whites had rallied near this building in the suburb of
Bridgeview. This time, vehicles sprouting giant US
flags raced down Harlem Avenue. There were horns and
peeling rubber. Two bare-chested men had flags painted
neck-to-navel on their bodies. Hundreds of flag-waving
white people roared in unison, "USA! USA!"
Out of the cacophony Nancy and her son Jim stood out.
They clutched American flags and sputtered indignantly
when the cops ordered them home. I later trudged
through the snow to their front door, hoping to peel
back the curtain on their anger.
Nancy, 56, was reserved while her son, 35, talked
harshly about Muslims. This went on for an hour, and
then the conversation took a turn away from race and
religion. Nancy spoke for the first time. From both now
poured a deeper animosity. Her knee is blown out, and
the HMO to which she belongs through her job selling
window coverings for J.C. Penney had been refusing an
implant. Nancy pulled back her top and showed a pain
patch on her shoulder. She was battling to get the
operation.
Jim excused himself. He returned with a shopping bag
stuffed with papers. It dropped with a loud thud on the
kitchen table. "These are my bills. Two hundred of
them. Ten thousand dollars, one of them. Fifteen
thousand, another," Jim said of some $200,000 in
medical bills that followed two heart attacks.
Jim had no health insurance. He remains alive by dint
of a sympathetic doctor who secretly slips him the $96
biweekly regimen of medicine.
Nancy had long ago made a foray into the stock market,
losing $10,000. Then she watched the market going up at
the end of the 1990s and decided to plunge back in. "My
neighbor said buy this one stock. He bought it for $4.
I bought it for $72, just before 9/11." She laughed a
sick laugh. "Now it’s worth $4."
Nancy and Jim were typical of those who marched at the
mosque—every person I interviewed was unemployed,
underemployed, hurting economically in some way. This
group of Americans, who number in the millions, harbors
deep-seated anger over corporate shenanigans, their
lack of healthcare and good jobs, yet in interview
after interview I found they are often the most fervent
in their support of George W. Bush and his tough
rhetoric.
Why? One answer is that Republicans have used "social
issues" such as school busing, Willie Horton and gay
marriage to speak to these Americans; they mine the
anger in the code-language way they have been doing
since Goldwater ran for President in 1964, deflecting
attention from the true cause of their problems. And
the Democrats have been timid, or unable to form a
message to break through to them. Another is what
happens in any wartime period, including World Wars I
and II and the Vietnam era. Any time the nation is at
war, there is a tendency toward nationalism.
But what I found after September 11 was different, and
more complex. I kept thinking of what I had been told
by John Russo, a labor studies professor at Youngstown
State University, at the time of the 1996 steelworkers’
strike in Ohio. Russo worried about the workers’
growing wrath—he was seeing it mature into xenophobia
and right-wing radicalism. "It’s not unlike the anger
in prewar Germany and prewar Italy," Russo said. And,
he added, it was akin to the United States in the Great
Depression. "In the 1930s, America could have gone in
either direction."
I didn’t wholly buy into Russo’s argument. Yes, there
was anger. Ohio, in the heart of the crippled Rust
Belt, had the most white nationalist groups of any
state in the Midwest—seventy-three—according to the
Center for New Community in Chicago. Yet the anger
didn’t seem to be building into a political force or
real threat. As I drew deeper into my research,
however, I began to see some historical parallels. In
1920s Weimar Germany, people carted bushel baskets of
money to buy a loaf of bread; the mark was valued at 4
billion to one US dollar at one point. Bank accounts
became worthless, and with economic deprivation came
growing anger. What did the government do? Instead of
raising taxes on the rich, who could pay, it lowered
them. The terrible conditions were actually good for
the industrialists and landlords. They wanted the mark
to tumble, because they were able to erase debts by
paying them off with worthless marks. For a brief time
late in the decade, things improved, but after 1929,
working-class anger erupted.
In America, too, there were stresses in the 1930s.
Father Charles Coughlin’s radio hate ministry
mid-decade had 10 million listeners. In hindsight it
appears there could have been no historical outcome
other than the election of Franklin Roosevelt. But what
if there had been no FDR? Walter Lippmann wrote that
the nation would have "followed almost any leader
anywhere he chose to go." A cynical leader could have
exploited fear, a course taken by so many other
inferior leaders in times of chaos. Three years into
Roosevelt’s term Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t
Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of the United
States. The novel became a historical footnote only
because Roosevelt was able to pull enough of the right
margin back to the center, or, as he often said,
"slightly left of center."
On the eve of a presidential election seventy-two years
after Roosevelt vs. Hoover, Americans are not rioting
over food, and homeless veterans are not marching on
Washington. But there are different ways for anger to
erupt. An undercurrent has been building for three
decades. Talk-radio is but one example of how the anger
has grown. In 1980 there were about seventy-five
stations in the nation that were all talk. There
weren’t that many conservative hosts. Now there are
1,300 all-talk stations, and conservatives rule. It’s
no coincidence that their popularity rose concurrent
with the decline of the manufacturing economy, as anger
deepened in American society. These shows were not a
cause but a free-market response.
How bad is it? During the 2000 election we went to
Texas and Tennessee to find some of the 11.6 million
impoverished children—77 percent had at least one
working parent, according to the Children’s Defense
Fund. Because their wages were Dickensian, many had to
beg for charity food. During what was alleged the most
booming economy in history, America’s Second Harvest
(the nationwide network of food banks) gave away 1
billion pounds of food in 2000, more than double the
amount in 1990. Yet it wasn’t enough—many food banks
ran empty. The despair we saw in the homes of working
Americans that election year was equal to that we saw
among the homeless in the early 1980s. In many houses I
peered into refrigerators and saw them empty. Never
underestimate the anger of a parent who puts her child
to bed hungry.
Many of the angry people I interviewed after 9/11,
those who tune in faithfully to Rush Limbaugh or Bill
O’Reilly, know their highly paid jobs are forever gone
or threatened. Their mood, I imagine, is like those on
the right during the 1930s who felt the economy would
never again be fixed; Limbaugh, O’Reilly and others are
their Father Coughlins.
And it’s not just those on the bottom. A software
engineer in Portland, Oregon, told me recently that
some of his colleagues have turned hard right, are
fearful for their jobs and are angry.
There are tens of millions of American workers living
in a virtual depression, in a virtual Weimar. Their
anger is real, as is their fear. Ignoring it is
dangerous. The right has been addressing it in the form
of appearing decisive with "preventive war," or by
cranking up the xenophobia. When many of them go into
the voting booth they will punch the card or pull the
lever for a candidate who appears strong.
But of course not all the support for Bush comes from
this camp. It doesn’t have to be a majority of voters
for this rage to have an impact. Given the closeness of
the 2000 election and the continued volatility of a
split body politic, tipping the scale just 1-2 percent
will turn things. It’s all about margins. The
hard-right third of the electorate will likely never
change. They were there in 1932, and they are with us
today. All that needs to happen for the nation to
re-elect George Bush, or another right-wing President
in the future, is for a fraction of voters to buy into
leaders who exploit the anger and fear. There are
plenty of malevolent voices to fill the space unclaimed
by a unifying, constructive voice.
If there isn’t another terror attack, and the economy
freezes in its current state of malaise for millions of
Americans, we will likely muddle through without the
anger taking a heavy toll. Like Sinclair Lewis’s book,
fears of America heading toward the end stage of a
Weimaresque journey will be relegated to the dustbin.
If there is another terror attack, however, or any of
myriad things happen that turn the economy deeply down,
who knows?
The solution lies in doing something both parties have
ignored in their free-trade euphoria: helping
working-class Americans with jobs and healthcare. That
will not erase the fear of another terror attack, but
it will dissipate some of the anger resulting from
economic hardship. It would tip the margin back to a
saner political course.
The soul of America will be decided by a fraction of
the middle, where a lot of the anger resides. And that
will require leadership.
If John Kerry wins, the right margin will rage against
him, as it did against Clinton before him, and against
FDR in the 1930s. The anger found in America is not
going to dissipate. It must be dealt with. And that
will take leadership. Is John Kerry the leader? He’d
better find his inner FDR—fast. If he does not, that
leader needs to rapidly emerge.