Of the four Staley workers I knew best and about whom I have written in this chapter, only Art Dhermy went back to work at Staley. When Dhermy returned to work, in February 1996, he went through a three-day orientation, during which he was told he would be fired if he ever used the word “scab” in the plant. Of those 350 union jobs, only 147 were filled by veterans of the lockout. The rest went to workers who had replaced them during the labor dispute.
“Those things will not be tolerated,” a manager warned Dhermy, even though Dhermy had been careful not to cross that lingustic line.
“What won’t be tolerated?” Dhermy asked. If they were threatening to take his job, he wanted the reason spelled out.
“You can’t call ’em by that name.”
“What name’s that?”
The manager refused to say it.
The replacement workers tried to bait Dhermy by addressing each other as “scab,” then asking him, “Isn’t that what you called us?” He never uttered the “s” word, but he did spit leaf tobacco juice on the boots of those who fit the description.
Even when they finally started showing up at union meetings, Dhermy referred to them as “half brothers” and “half sisters” and joined votes to defeat their motions. (It wasn’t “scab” and it wasn’t on Staley property, so he was Okay.) Despite getting his job back, Dhermy spent the next decade and a half recovering financially from the lockout. He had spent $8,000 in savings, sold stock he’d been hoarding for retirement, and refinanced his house at a higher rate.
“I’d been planning to retire when I was sixty-one, but I couldn’t,” he said. “I pretty well got everything paid off that I was in the hole, but the thing is, by getting that paid off, I haven’t been able to put anything aside for retirement.”
Through the millwrights’ union, Mike Griffin found work at factories around the Midwest, including the Caterpillar plant in Peoria and a nuclear power plant in Nebraska. Some of the jobs kept him away from his wife for six weeks at a time. (“I couldn’t have stood going back to Staley. I would have choked the piss out of a scab the first day.”) Griffin’s brother-in-law, a millwright at Firestone, had crossed the picket line during his union’s strike. Only death reconciled them. Griffin went to the funeral, out of respect for his sister. During the lockout, he left the Baptist church he had attended for twenty-seven years. Some of the parishioners were executives at Caterpillar and Staley, and as a result, the congregation would not take sides in the lockout. Griffin has not belonged to a church since. A union does the Lord’s work.
“I still believe in God,” he said. “I still believe in my fellow man. I still believe in the union. I’m union through and through. I’m talking about standing up for my fellow workers and standing up against the boss when he puts you in harm’s way, and standing up for the poor.”
Needless to say, Griffin hopes that the union president who succeeded Dave Watts is buried with his ass sticking out of the ground, so the wild dogs can hump him for eternity.
Dan Lane divorced his wife, moved to suburban Detroit, and remarried.
When the lockout ended, Dave Watts was forty-eight years old and a grandfather—too old, too much the family man to leave Decatur. Although still officially local president when the contract was approved, he refused to validate it with his signature. An official from the international had to sign. Watts resigned from the company and the union and went to work as a home remodeler. He had to work for himself, because nobody would hire the working-class militant who’d led the Staley lockout. Watts was so bitter about the news coverage of the lockout that he stopped listening to WSOY, canceled his subscription to the Herald & Review, and even quit attending church because the newspaper’s labor reporter served as a lector. Watts was poorer. He’d lost friends. He couldn’t find another job. He was taunted on the street. And he’d lost a contract dispute that, he believed, so intimidated the labor movement that Caterpillar and Firestone wouldn’t vote to strike even if their wages were cut in half. As part of the campaign to destroy unions, his career and his reputation had been destroyed, as though by a remote missile, to increase the profits of a company six thousand miles away. After the lockout ended, the only part of Dave Watts’s life that was better was the most important part.
“It almost cost me my marriage,” he said. “She, like all the rest of them, she could see all the pain we were going through trying to fight a losing battle, the loss, the monetary and hope and all those things that were being flushed down the toilet. She said, ‘It’s time to move on,’ long before it was over.”
10.
“We’re All Going to End Up in Chicago”
“What did Chicago do right?” a woman from Cleveland once asked me.
In the 1990s, Chicago was the only Midwestern industrial city to gain population—and not just for that decade, but for any decade since the middle of the twentieth century. In 1950, Chicago was the second-largest city in the United States, while Cleveland was sixth. By 2010, Chicago was third, but Cleveland was forty-fifth. A young man who arrived in Chicago in the mid-1980s to work as a community organizer among laid-off steelworkers left in 2008 as president-elect of the United States and the representative of a new type of global citizen. Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and an American mother, had lived in Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York, but rose to world power in Chicago. Three years later, Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest, most famous women on the planet, filmed her last talk show at the United Center, a sports arena built for the crowds who wanted to watch Michael Jordan, the most world-renowned athlete since Muhammad Ali, play basketball. In its search for America’s best pizza, GQ magazine named a storefront pizzeria in Chicago. Chicago’s Steppenwolf theater, founded in a church basement by actor Gary Sinise, premiered the play August: Osage County, which went on to Broadway and a Pulitzer Prize for its author, Tracy Letts.
Donald Trump built a tower surmounted by a $9 million penthouse in the Loop. Two decades before, the Loop had been a bustling business district by day, but its after-five attractions consisted of block after sketchy block of Italian beef stands, adult bookstores, and dank taverns. The surrounding area is now the fastest-growing neighborhood in Chicago, and two-thirds of its residents have college degrees.
Why, then, did Chicago not fulfill the obituary written for it in 1980? Why did it become an Alpha World City, in the same league as Paris, Mumbai, Shanghai, Frankfurt, and Sydney, while Cleveland became the Mistake on the Lake, and Detroit became the destination for European art photographers documenting urban decay?
The woman’s real question was, “How can Cleveland imitate Chicago’s success?” I had hoped to provide an answer in this chapter, but the answer is “Cleveland can’t.” Neither can Detroit or Milwaukee or Buffalo or Indianapolis. There can be only one Midwestern metropolis. Chicago’s success is not only inimitable, it comes at the expense of every other city in the region.
The North Side of Chicago is such a refuge for young economic migrants from my home state that its nickname is “Michago.” At a now-defunct bar called the Gin Mill, a green neon sign flashed “WELCOME TO EAST LANSING” at twenty-two-year-olds who’d used up four years of eligibility in their frat houses but wanted to keep partying. In 2000, a quarter of Michigan State graduates left the state. By 2010, half were leaving, and the city with the most recent graduates was not East Lansing or Detroit but Chicago. Michigan’s universities once educated auto executives, engineers, and governors. Now their main purpose is giving Michigan’s brightest young people the credential they need to get the hell out of the state. In the 2000s, Michigan dropped from thirtieth to thirty-fifth in percentage of college graduates. Chicago is the drain into which the brains of the Middle West disappear. Moving there is not even an aspiration for ambitious Michiganders. It’s the accepted endpoint of one’s educational progression: grade school, middle school, high school, college, Chicago, with perhaps a gap year of low-wage slacking between the last two stations. Once, in a Lansing bookstore,
I heard a clerk say with a sigh, “We’re all going to end up in Chicago.” An Iowa governor traveled to Chicago just to beg his state’s young people to come home.
Every University of Michigan B.S. who moves to Chicago is one less engineer for Detroit. It’s another consequence of globalization, the same force destroying the middle class in Decatur: just as money and education have become concentrated among fewer people, they’ve become concentrated among fewer cities, too. Chicago is one of the winners.
I met Joe Lambert at a fund-raiser for Young Chicago Lakefront, the youth auxiliary of the 44th Ward Democratic machine. I’d discovered the group during the 2004 presidential campaign, when they’d gathered in a bar to heckle Vice President Cheney’s speech. Everyone wore a shining button-down Oxford, everyone gripped a beer bottle as though it were the handle that would keep them from tumbling out the door. They had political jobs, but they were West Wing types, all angling to be the next George Stephanopoulos, or the next Rahm Emanuel, who was at that time a congressman, representing Lake View.
A long arm waved from the bar. I remembered Justin. He was a young man from a conservative Dutch Reformed community in Iowa who’d moved to Chicago, announced he was gay, and broken his family’s heart by becoming a Democrat.
Justin handed me a business card. He was a spokesman for Governor Rod Blagojevich. In Lake View, coming out was good for your political career. It was the city’s gay neighborhood. Halsted Street, the main strip of the Boys’ Town district, threw a Pride Parade every summer. The mayor had marched in it. The mayor loved gays. Gays kept up their houses and never moved to the suburbs “for the schools.” Even the alderman was gay, appointed for that very quality.
A young aide to the state senator waved a sheaf of tickets.
“The senator is in Springfield next Tuesday, so he’s donated his Cubs tickets.” The whole bar was paying attention now. In Lake View, a Cubs game is a social coup akin to the opera in Gilded Age New York. “I’ve got four tickets for anyone who can tell me what the Twenty-Fourth Amendment says.”
“Poll tax!” I stabbed.
That was it. The aide came down from the bar and handed me the tickets. I passed my spares to the people standing closest.
“See you next Tuesday,” I told them. “Meet me at the Harry Caray statue.”
ONLY LAMBERT SHOWED UP. He had taken the afternoon off from a consulting company that installed sales tax software for businesses. He walked off the L, shouldering the same backpack he’d worn as a Michigan State accounting major less than a year before.
A spring cloudburst chased us into the stadium. By the time it cleared, the groundskeepers were dragging their huge plastic handkerchief across the sodden infield.
Since there wasn’t going to be a ball game, Joe and I walked down Clark Street to a University of Iowa bar. All the Big Ten rivalries have contracted into these few blocks of Chicago. We ordered pints of microbrew and Lambert told me about his hometown, Houghton Lake, Michigan, a blue-collar resort for autoworkers who want to spend a weekend up north but can’t afford a Lake Michigan cottage.
“There’s a lot of people around here who are small-town Iowa and Michigan and Indiana,” he said. “This is their big break.”
Joe had tried to stay in Michigan, he’d tried. He thought Lansing would be a good place to start his career, but the only job he could find was at Enterprise Rent-a-Car. So he expanded his search, to Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, D.C. … and Chicago. A faculty adviser told him about an opening at the consulting firm. He rode Amtrak’s Blue Water line to Chicago for the job interview and got a phone call the next day.
“I think I took my final on a Wednesday, and I moved to Chicago on a Monday,” he said.
Joe shared a $2,300 apartment with a project manager for a credit card company and a woman who’d just finished graduate work at Harvard. Both were twenty-seven, nearing the end of the Lake View lifespan. The living room’s centerpiece was a long white couch, positioned for the best view of the forty-seven-inch high-definition television. Empty Netflix sleeves flopped over the TV’s top. An Xbox was umbilically linked to the control panel. The shelves behind were crammed with DVDs, as glossily colored as the spines of anime books.
The books were in the bedroom. He’d been reading America (The Book), Bill Clinton’s My Life, Che Guevara Reader, Animal Farm, and a few novels by Chuck Palahniuk. Dangling from a nail next to the bookcase was a VIP pass to a John Kerry rally.
In Lake View, it is possible to live on a block more homogenous than you’d find in any small town. Not only is it segregated by race—almost everyone is white—it’s segregated by age, too. Rarely do you see anyone younger than twenty-two or older than thirty-five.
“Honestly, there are not many families here,” Joe said. “I’ve only got a couple friends who live in buildings with families. Most of the people in my building are young single people like me. Some as old as twenty-seven. I know one guy who moved to Denver, he was twenty-six, twenty-seven, he was starting to think about the next phase of his life. This area, it’s intensely individualistic, and everyone’s moving on to the next thing.”
That was in 2005. When I saw Joe again, five years later, he was twenty-eight and had moved on from Lake View to Wicker Park, a Brooklyn-like neighborhood of rock and roll nightclubs, martini bars, and denim boutiques. (When MTV filmed a Real World season in Chicago, it rented the kids a building in Wicker Park.) We ate at Big Star, a taco joint modeled on Austin, Texas, which is more familiar to most Wicker Park residents than the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, only a few miles west on Division Street. Lambert had a new job, with an accounting firm, and was engaged to a woman from Boston. In the Rust Belt states, there’s a rule of thumb that once kids are gone for five years, they’re gone forever. After twenty-seven or so, they start breeding, building nests.
“Do you think you’ll ever move back to Michigan?” I asked Joe.
“Honestly, I love the city,” he said. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather live. It’s one of those things that the more time I spend here, the more I love about it. I travel a lot for work, and I’ve been to all the other cities, and it’s one of only two metropolises in America. For everything that Michigan has going for it, they’ve squandered a lot of their resources. When the auto industry moved out, they had nothing to fall back on. Chicago is in a prime position to take advantage of that, because it’s centrally located, in the middle of all the Big Ten schools, it’s got white-collar jobs. I get calls from alumni saying, ‘I’m thinking about moving to Chicago.’ I say, ‘By all means, come here. It’s been great to me.’”
Chicago had also been great to Ryan Wiltshire, a twenty-six-year-old aerospace engineer who grew up in Northwest Detroit, a lower-middle-class neighborhood at 8 Mile and Telegraph. In Chicago, he was selling transmission distribution products for General Electric and living in a brownstone two-flat in Lincoln Park. His apartment was across the street from an outdoor café, where we went for coffee. We’d been introduced by the president of the University of Michigan Alumni Club’s Chicago chapter. When I asked Wiltshire whether he’d have an easier time finding a U of M classmate in Chicago or Detroit, he seemed startled by my obtuseness.
“I think I’d have a much easier time here,” he said. “I can think of a handful, on one, maybe two hands, that stayed. And they wanted to stay. If I got the opportunity, I’d love to stay in Michigan. I looked for a job there, but there’s only one or two very small companies that hire aerospace engineers. There’s actually a big U of M scene here. There’s three or four bars that people go to on football Saturday.”
Twenty-six-year-olds like walking from their apartments to the historic nightclub where the Smashing Pumpkins played their first record-release party, passing a dozen taverns along the way. Twenty-six-year-olds—even twenty-six-year-olds from Detroit—like public transportation, because a) cars are expensive and generate greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, and b) you can’t read the New York Times on an iPhone w
hile you’re driving.
“I like the density and just the kind of things that culminated here,” Wiltshire said. “Michigan is a commuter state. There aren’t activities for someone my age. In Detroit, any time I want to see someone, I have to jump in the car.”
Ryan was nostalgic for Detroit, but he was not optimistic about living there again.
“All I hear about Detroit from its glory days is from my parents and grandparents,” he said. “My great-grandfather moved up from South Texas to work at Ford for five dollars a day. We still own a house in Detroit but there’s not much there for me. The neighborhood has changed. It’s not the kind of place I want to live. A lot of people have lost their jobs, lost their houses. Still, most people want to move back and try to rebuild the Detroit that was there. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But someday.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1995, I had taken the advice of that forgotten magazine and left Decatur for the nearest happening city, three and a half hours away.
Young Michiganders are tugged at by two cities: Detroit and Chicago. As a boy, I wanted to live in Detroit. As a young man, I ended up in Chicago. How that happened explains a lot about the fortunes of the Midwest’s metropolises in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Michigan is a peninsula (two, in fact). The root of that word is “insula”—Latin for “island,” and a good description of the inhabitants. Michiganders vacation up north, driving deeper into the rustic dead end that separates the state from the rest of America. When I was growing up, Lake Huron was my Atlantic Ocean, Lake Michigan was my Pacific Ocean, and Detroit was my New York City. The Detroit Free Press was the biggest newspaper delivered in Lansing (I delivered it in the sixth grade), so I thought working there would be the pinnacle of journalistic achievement.
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