* * *
In the coming months, Mark would stay sober. But Berens would reinstate his felony and enter a conviction with a fine and a suspended year in state prison. If Mark slipped again, he’d join Lloyd and Jason. Mark was angry about the felony, upset that even as the black-and-blue scars on his arms faded, the felony would remain. He struggled to adopt a Zen attitude about it, and hoped that someday there’d be a way to erase the conviction, and his past.
Carly would be picked up for a probation violation. Mark would feel sad for her. By then, he’d be nearly weaned off Suboxone and looking forward to a trip with his grandfather. He’d have to always be alert, but as time passed, he would come to believe that he’d left heroin behind for good.
Not much would change for John and Wendy Oatney. Between John’s learning disability and his menacing conviction, finding a job began to seem like an impossible dream. Having heard that there was work in Kentucky, he considered driving there and sleeping in his car until he could convince somebody to take him on, but he reconsidered and kept looking around Fairfield County. Eventually, he’d find work unloading trucks at a discount store for $8.50 an hour. Wendy would get a raise to $9.70 an hour. The police would return John’s gun.
The Lancaster Festival would name Ken Culver as the new executive director. Culver once worked as an Anchor Hocking PR man before the sale to Newell. He’d served as a city councilman and volunteered at the Glass Museum. Joe Piccolo had been right: Picking a local who understood Lancaster, and who would let Lancaster be Lancaster, would prove to be the better choice. The weather would be touch-and-go for the 2016 edition of the festival, but the skies would clear at critical moments, and a big crowd would pay to see the veteran country singer Vince Gill, who would happily perform with the orchestra.
Dave Benson would announce his retirement from the fair.
Ashley would call me to say she’d been evicted from the east-side house and that she’d “lost” the Bitchmobile. She’d tell a confusing story about an ex-boyfriend I’d met, who smoked crack in her bathroom and stole money from her. She stayed at the Relax Inn for a little while, but her monthly $600 of SSI money didn’t last, so she slept outside in an alley. She was on her way to another Ohio town, where, she said, she had a friend who might take her in.
The young girl from the trailer park, the one Ashley said was growing up too fast, would run away from home. She would leave a note for her mother.
Mayor Brian Kuhn would be indicted on two felony counts of failing to file state income tax returns. He would refuse to resign his office. His wife would plead guilty to theft and be sentenced to four years in state prison.
The city council members would continue to fight among themselves. Both sides would file dueling lawsuits, at an indeterminate cost to the city’s taxpayers.
Michele Ritchlin would create Homework Club, a scholarship system funded by local donors to supplement the diminished budget available to pay for kids whose families could not afford the after-school program. Thirty-six businesses and individuals would donate, including Nancy Frick and her husband, Paul. And in July 2016, Ritchlin would receive the call she’d hoped for: The program would receive two grants of $200,000 each—two of only twenty-six grants approved from 202 applications. The program’s target population, the state would decide, was poorer than it had thought. Ritchlin, who once described herself as an anti-tax, Ayn Rand libertarian, would laugh at the obvious contradiction and say that even in the face of new realities, her old beliefs died hard.
That was true of Lancaster as a whole. It had become a town that lived on federal and state government money. But many refused to acknowledge the connection, because, as Mark Kraft could tell them, denial was comforting. The system they believed in was not The System that actually prevailed. That past system had been destroyed, or driven to the brink of destruction, in part by buccaneering free-market finance and Friedmanism. Acknowledging that fact was as painful as a devout religionist losing faith, something cosmopolitan liberals refused to empathize with. Abandoning Lancaster’s old moderate conservative pragmatism to blame sin, laziness, scientists, immigrants, unions, and any number of other enemies of the American Way allowed the illusion that Forbes magazine had helped establish to remain a viable belief, one to be resurrected, not mourned.
Sam Solomon would stay sore about his dismissal. He would take his time finding his “new passion in life”—but until he found it, he would mentor and coach businesspeople. A biographical sketch for his appearance as a keynote speaker at a National Women Business Owners Corporation conference would say that he “recently completed a turnaround of EveryWare Global that required raising new capital, restructuring debt, reigniting the new product development engine and returning the company to profitability.”
The board of EveryWare Global would hire Patrick Lockwood-Taylor, a former Procter & Gamble executive, as CEO. Taylor, an Englishman who’d worked around the world on behalf of P&G brands, would tell me that the board was “compassionate and genuinely intrigued by what is possible. They agree on three things: the fantastic brands—iconic. Two, we have a duty to improve safety. And, three, they have committed to, and have invested capital into, the plant for improved efficiency and safety.”
The employees in Lancaster would take a skeptical view. Lockwood-Taylor had never been a CEO. He’d left a large multinational like P&G to become one at a small, unprofitable (Solomon’s bio notwithstanding) company. Maybe he was just punching his CEO ticket on his way to some bigger, fancier job. Or maybe he meant it when he said that he knew all about Milton Friedman’s doctrine of profits above all—community be damned—and rejected it.
In a series of three videos he made for company employees, he would acknowledge that tough union negotiations were still to come, but that all workers were “owners” of the company. Nobody bought that part. “Many of you remember the heyday of these great companies and brands,” he would say. “I want to get back to that feeling that we are the best in the industry and be proud of this company.” When the organization is prospering, he’d say, “the community is prospering. I want us to get back to that.” They would hope that was true. Lockwood-Taylor would not say that the board was entertaining offers to sell.
* * *
Why did they stay? That was the obvious question. Why didn’t they take Lora Manon’s advice and fly like the wind away from Lancaster? Some people had come down from Columbus to buy a cheaper house in a tract at the edge of town, so their presence wasn’t mysterious. Chris Cruit, Joe Boyer, Chris Nagle—they were easy to explain, too. They had a lot of years in Plant 1, and unless they wanted to try for a job in Toledo, at Libbey, there probably wasn’t another place in the country where their skills would transfer.
But why did Rebekah Krutsch stay? Rebekah was a waitress at Cherry Street Pub. Even now, she was skittering back and forth behind Brian, hustling to deliver food orders.
The past decade in Lancaster had been a bumpy ride. The home she and her ex-husband once owned fell into foreclosure during the Great Recession. The financial strain contributed to their divorce. She had four children, who lived with her on the west side near Plant 1. But Rebekah had a lot going for her, too. She was pretty, with a carved face and a mass of curly red hair. She had a college degree. She made art—wire constructions on painted canvases—which she sometimes sold for extra money. Waitressing was her second job. During the day, she worked for the Recovery Center as a drug education teacher in the local schools, a full-time position for which she estimated she took home about $24,000 per year. Her waitressing added another $1,000 per month, income that kept her off food stamps. The government-subsidized health insurance that so many criticized helped a lot. She knew she could probably find work making more money elsewhere, and she was more acutely aware of Lancaster’s ugly side than many others were. But when I asked why she didn’t move away, she looked at me with wide, pitying eyes and said, “This is my town”—as if my asking the question meant I’d been deprived of
the quiet power of belonging to a place.
Lancaster people were good people. “There’s a lot of love and passion here,” she said. “You see it where we are sitting. I wait tables in it. I work in it every day in the schools. The teachers and staff love it. If they didn’t love it, they wouldn’t be there. Those junior highs, Ewing and Sherman, are falling apart. Literally falling apart. I walk into Sherman and Ewing when they reopen in the late summer and it’s stifling. But they love their schools. I’m not going anywhere. I like my town.”
She sounded like Gerry Stebelton, the lawyer and former state representative whose firm took over the old Anchor Hocking headquarters, and whose mother had spent decades in the Anchor sluer. He had something to show me, he’d said. So we walked into a corner office overlooking trees, the statue of Sherman, Main Street, Broad Street, and the big golden sandstone City Hall. One day, he told me, he’d stood right where we stood. As it happened, it was a day much like the day we spoke, with the sun illuminating City Hall under a blue sky. He was on the phone with somebody from New York, or maybe it was Chicago, and the next thing he knew he choked up, and an involuntary “My God!” came out of his mouth. The voice on the other end asked what had happened. “Nothing,” Stebelton said. “I’m just looking at the most beautiful sight in the world.”
Many Lancastrians felt the same way. But the festival’s hundreds of volunteers; the people who gave to Community Action, the Fairfield County Foundation, the United Way, Foundation Dinners, Maywood Mission, their churches; the ladies (and a few men) of the Cameo League and the Heritage Association; Loving Lending, which had helped John and Wendy Oatney; the tutors and board members of the West Side After School Program; and a lot of other bighearted, strong-willed people would be mocked by opinionistas like Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal:
The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
For decades, politicians—Republicans and Democrats both—and pundits had all been spewing empty platitudes of praise for “the heartland,” “real America,” and “small-town values.” Then, with shameless hypocrisy, they supported the very policies that helped destroy thriving small towns.
Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions—or no unions at all—so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs.
Having helped wreck small towns, some conservatives were now telling the people in them to pack up and leave. The reality of “Real America” had become a “negative asset.”
The “vicious, selfish culture” didn’t come from small towns, or even from Hollywood or “the media.” It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of “returns.” America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.
“This is a success-driven culture, right?” Sam Solomon once said. “This is America, so we tend to really harp on winners. And as long as you are winning—skipping your stone across the pond—that’s what gets reported, and we quickly forget the losers.” Somebody who plodded along, slowly building, was forgotten. “That’s not interesting at all. So it’s a little bit of that culture that we’ve created. That’s what works in America.”
If you worked for $10, $12, $15 an hour, you were a loser, and you knew people thought of you as a loser. They didn’t want to see you, didn’t want to know you, didn’t want their children to play with your children. So they built bigger and bigger houses behind sturdier and sturdier gates. What’s more, your life would never be better. The path Dale Lamb had walked, and four generations of glassworkers before him had walked, had become a dead end.
People like Kevin Williamson, and some in Lancaster, too, preached the gospel of personal responsibility. A prominent local doctor expressed outrage after he’d tried to hire an unemployed job seeker to mow his lawn for $30. The man turned him down. This was proof, the doctor argued, that the underclass just wanted to lie around collecting welfare.
Thirty dollars, though, wasn’t a path to anywhere. But the attitude was part of the gospel, and who could argue with it? Of course people should act responsibly. They should do what’s best for themselves and the commonweal.
“Have you no morals, man?” Pickering asks Alfred Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion. “Can’t afford them, Governor,” he responds. “Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”
The greater the income inequality, and the fewer decent-paying jobs there are for people with high school diplomas (or less), the greater the chances that a young woman won’t marry the father of her baby. Why would she? Middle-class morality may be a luxury she can’t afford. A young man with no job—or a job at Sonic making minimum wage—could very well turn out to be more of a burden than a help. What help would Ashley’s baby daddy be to Ashley? He lived in the same Dogpatch trailer park she lived in. But she might want a baby, or perhaps just not take care not to have a baby, because a child might be the one person in her life she could love who would love her back. And America esteems motherhood. Ashley might be a poor, school-dropout addict—the daughter of a poor, uneducated addict—but at least she could be a mother.
Brian Gossett understood. “These people, they’ve got nothing else, man. So instead of saying, ‘Well, I’ll be a worker at this place,’ or, ‘I’ll be that,’ it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m a heroin addict. And I have tattoos.’”
Even Judge David Trimmer, an adherent of a strict interpretation of the personal-responsibility gospel, had to acknowledge that having no job, or a lousy job, was not going to give a thirty-five-year-old man much purpose in life. So many times, people wandered through his courtroom like nomads. “I always tell them, ‘You’re like a leaf blowing from a tree. Which direction do you go? It depends on where the wind is going.’ That’s how most of them live their lives. I ask th
em, ‘What’s your purpose in life?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t even love yourself, do you?’ ‘No.’”
Trimmer and the doctor still believed in a world with an intact social contract. But the social contract was shattered long ago. They wanted Lancaster to uphold its end of a bargain that had been made obsolete by over three decades of greed.
Monomoy Capital Partners, Carl Icahn, Cerberus Capital Management, Newell, Wexford, Barington, Clinton—none of them bore any personal responsibility. A&M and $1,200-per-hour lawyers didn’t bear any personal responsibility. They didn’t get a lecture or a jail sentence: They got rich. The politicians—from both parties—who enabled their behavior and that of the payday- and car-title-loan vultures, and the voters of Lancaster who refused to invest in the future of their town as previous generations had done (even as they cheered Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer, who took $6.1 million per year in public money), didn’t bear any personal responsibility.
With the fracturing of the social contract, trust and social cohesion fractured, too. Even Brad Hutchinson, a man who had millions of reasons to believe in The System, had no faith in politicians or big business. “I think that most politicians, if not all politicians, are crooked as the day is long,” Hutchinson said. “They don’t have on their minds what’s best for the people.” Business leaders had no ethics, either. “There’s disconnect everywhere. On every level of society. Everybody’s out for number one. Take care of yourself. Zero respect for anybody else.”
So it wasn’t just the poor or the working class who felt disaffected, and it wasn’t just about money or income inequality. The whole culture had changed. Brian was from a middle-class family, but he didn’t believe in any institution or person in authority. He didn’t feel like he was part of anything bigger than himself. Aside from his mother and father, and his brother, Mike, he was alone.
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