Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Like many young workers at places like Doehler, Goddard had dreamed of working for one of the Big Three auto companies. The pay was $2.50 an hour more, and, even more important, it was the major leagues. What expedited his decision was an incident during a strike at Doehler. He and some other workers were trying to block the entrance to the plant. The head of personnel drove up.

  “Hey, Goddard,” he said as Goddard charged at his car, waving a sign, “what the hell’s your real bitch, anyway? You’re doing well. You don’t have the hardest life in the world.”

  “I want to make as much as someone at the Big Three,” Goddard answered.

  “Well, then,” said the personnel man, pointing in the general direction of Detroit, “better get up the road to the Rouge, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to make it.”

  After the strike was over, the idea of Ford grew in Goddard’s mind. His father-in-law tried to argue him out of leaving. Goddard had a good secure job, he pointed out, and in two years he would be able to freeze his pension. The temptation was too great, however, and in 1972 Goddard took a job at a Ford plant in Toledo. That plant was doing experimental work on turbine engines. It was supposed to be a hot area, and everyone was excited about producing an engine that required less gas. Goddard was told by old hands that he had gone to the right place at the right time. About five months after he joined the company, he attended a large meeting at which a number of proud and happy managers congratulated everyone because word had just been received that they could proceed with Phase Three on the new turbine engine. The future was theirs. That meeting was on a Tuesday. On Friday, Ford closed the entire plant down. The Ford people were vague about relocating Goddard, and for a time he worked in a small job shop in Toledo. But he soon learned his lesson there—in a place like that, only one person, the owner, really benefits. Soon, hearing that there might be work at the Ford plant in Rawsonville, one of two Ford plants where diemaking was still done, he drove up on his own and found a job. That was in 1973. He had almost six good years at Ford, and then, late in 1978, came the layoff.

  In early 1979, as the layoff continued, Joel Goddard began to pay more attention to the news. He did not like being prejudiced, but he could not help it. He couldn’t stand the idea of a dinky Arab country like Iran being able to stick up the United States of America, arbitrarily changing the price of gasoline and disrupting his own life. Iran was a shitty little ragamuffin country run by crummy people. Every day there were terrible stories on television about what was happening there, and his feelings about them connected, he knew, to the frustrations in his own life. He felt oddly powerless. He hated Iranians and Arabs. The Japanese were just as bad. We knocked them on their ass in World War II, he thought, and deservedly so, and then we helped them back up, and here they are taking jobs away from us. The more he followed the international news, the uneasier he felt about his job. The pleasure of the strike-as-vacation had long since disappeared, replaced by anxiety. The news from the plant became as discouraging as the news on television: Rather than hiring people back, Ford was thinking of laying off still more. All the same, he had his benefits, and that was rightfully his money, something he had earned.

  Every two weeks he went first to the unemployment office to pick up his check for about $300, then to Ford for his SUB check—Supplemental Unemployment Benefits—equaling roughly 95 percent of his base salary. Since his base pay for forty hours was about $550, which after taxes came to $375, and his unemployment compensation was subtracted from the amount he received, he drew about $375 a week for the first year he was unemployed.

  After about six months he became bored with fishing and daytime television. He read the want ads in the newspaper every day, but there was nothing there for a diemaker. Friends of his were starting to go to Texas, lured by the promise of a booming oil economy there. Goddard wasn’t eager to join them. He loved where he lived and was reluctant to move. Still, his self-esteem was ebbing fast. He was a grown man, unable to support his family. After about six months he heard of an insurance company that would hire men like him to sell insurance. He tried it and soon came to detest it. His early sales were almost entirely to friends. He had always disliked the idea of selling; now, hopelessly miscast, he was succeeding only in exploiting his friendships. It was a misery for him to call strangers on the phone with a sales pitch and even worse to sell them in person. Only when he thought of his bills and his family’s needs could he steel himself to do it. After several months he quit, his self-confidence badly damaged by the experience. Years later his wife, not a person much given to bitterness, still felt genuine anger about the way the insurance company had behaved. As far as she was concerned, it had taken a bunch of desperate neophytes, conned them into believing they could succeed in a very difficult profession, and left them to flounder. When they failed, there was no loss to the company. Quite the reverse. Having added the friends of the failed salesmen to its list of policyholders, it simply went on to find another batch of instant salesmen.

  The Goddards by then had long since sold two of the snowmobiles. Then they had sold their boat for $2400, which covered their house payments for several months. Now, painfully, they drew on the money put away for their children’s college educations. Yet for all the financial pressures, the fiercest stress Goddard was undergoing was more psychological than financial. His pride and dignity were at stake, as well as his family’s survival.

  Joyce Goddard went to work at K mart as a checkout supervisor. It was the first time she had worked since their marriage. She knew the money was critical to their household, and she thought Joel would welcome her help. She was making $5 an hour, bringing home $150 a week to a family that badly needed it. As long as she was working they were guaranteed food. But her success—she did well and was soon promoted—coincided with his failure and further undermined his ego. He liked to think of himself as a macho man, independent, afraid of no one, a man who could take good care of his family, whose wife did not have to work. An American success story. Now he began to feel that it was his fault he was out of work. For the first time the Goddards began to have serious marital problems. Unable to find work, Joel Goddard rebuked himself for failing to finish college; a degree would have given him an advantage at a time like this. He became angry at Joyce for working when he was not, and he picked fights with her. If she came back after a long day and said she was tired, he would snap at her, telling her he had done it for ten years, Saturdays and Sundays too, and he didn’t need to hear any crap from her.

  1980 was their worst year. The Ford benefits had run out, the news on television was always bad, and there was no prospect of work. He withdrew entirely, talking to no one, sleeping long hours. He became addicted to daytime television shows. Joyce, anxious to help and mindful that they had always had a strong marriage, reached out to him and was wounded by his rejection. In the past, they had always been able to talk about their problems, but now when she tried he refused to answer her. Days would pass without a real conversation. She found some solace in talking to a minister and disclosing the pain she felt because she could not reach her husband. “You have every right to expect Joel’s love, Joyce,” the minister said, “but you can’t have it if Joel doesn’t have it to give. Right now,” he added, “Joel is empty.”

  That helped explain some of their difficulties, and she was grateful to the minister, but she was still preoccupied with what his problems were doing to her. She was sure their marriage was not going to last. Her guilt grew. Joel, she thought, was such a good and gentle man. She knew that her situation was not unique, was not even among the worst; she had heard the horror stories of other blue-collar men working out their frustrations by physically abusing their wives and children. What made Joel’s suffering particularly painful for her was her sense that Joel’s life was not necessarily one of his choice, that he had been diverted from an easier life, as a white-collar man with a college degree, by their early marriage and the coming of a family. Just as he had pr
oved how good he was at his work, just as he had begun to value himself properly, this had happened. It struck her as unjust. Finally she began to think what for her was unthinkable: She would give Joel a divorce, if what he wanted was freedom from her and the children. Only then was she able to see her husband’s dilemma clearly and give him the space he needed: When she mentioned the idea of divorce to him, he became terribly upset. There was some measure of relief for her in that.

  Goddard was terrified of the future and doubted he would ever work at Ford again. In late 1980, now laid off for two years, he sent out résumés to companies in Texas and the Pacific Northwest. The idea of leaving Pinckney, the town he loved, was hard, but he was ready for the move. But first, he promised himself as part of his New Year’s resolution, he would make one more effort to find work nearby. In January 1981 he was hired at a small job shop. He had been out of work for more than two years.

  The hiring process was not particularly pleasant. He showed the boss his journeyman’s card from Ford, one of his proudest possessions. “That doesn’t mean shit here,” the man said. “You can buy those papers on the street. We’ve had a lot of men from Ford here, and none of them could cut the mustard.” Asked what he’d made at Ford, Goddard said fifteen dollars an hour. “My journeymen make eleven,” the boss said. “I’ll start you at ten.”

  On Monday Goddard bought new work clothes. On Tuesday he went to work. The first thing he noticed that morning was the icy stares of the workers as he walked from one end of the plant to another. There was no energy, no life, in that cold and hostile place. As Goddard later put it, they were men whose bodies were alive but whose minds and souls had died. The plant was a scene from the nineteenth century. The stench was terrible, the oil-and-grease-and-dirt smell of a place that has never been cleaned. The lighting was dismal. How, he wondered, can men work in light this bad? He was suddenly terrified. There’s no way I can do this, he thought, no way I can make it here. It was as if he were professionally paralyzed. As he worked he knew the other workers were snickering at him, the big star from Ford who was having trouble hacking it. When he asked a worker for a piece of equipment, he would get no answer. No one would speak to him at all. It struck him that he was going to fail.

  On the first day he was asked to align a part he had made, but because of the specialization at Ford, aligning had not been part of his job there, and he did not know how. The boss came over and said, “This ain’t worth crap. What the hell are you doing? I thought you were a Ford-trained diemaker.”

  “I am,” said Goddard.

  “A Ford man, shit,” said the boss. “Anybody could do this job.”

  That night Goddard went home and told Joyce he was not going to make it. She, of course, did not believe him. “I’ve lost all my confidence,” he said. She told him to go back, that it would work out. The next day he went to work, and the boss called him in. “Listen,” he said, “you’re really screwing up. I’m not sure you can cut it here. You’ve got too much to learn. I can’t afford to pay you what I’ve been paying you if I’ve got to teach you everything. I tell you what—I’ll cut you to eight while you’re learning.”

  That was one more humiliation. The morning went even worse than the first one. Finally Goddard took his three toolboxes and trudged out. The other men were sitting around having lunch, and as he walked he knew they were watching him and gloating over his failure. He felt demeaned. He wasn’t sure if he had quit or been fired, but if he had been fired, he thought, it was from a shithole.

  When he got home, he barricaded himself in his bedroom, and for the third time in his life (the first was when he broke a leg in a high school football game, the second was when his father died), he cried. Joyce Goddard felt just as bad. When the job first came up he had mentioned that it was not exactly what he had been trained for, but she had blithely told him that he could do it. He had been wiser than she, and now, because of her mistake, he had been brought even lower in his own eyes. For four days he stayed in his room. On Monday he came out, picked up the phone, and started calling his friends to see if they knew of any work. A friend working in a machine shop some thirty miles away had heard of a job there. Goddard went and got it. He started at $11.50 an hour.

  Sanosuke Tanaka was pleased by the success of Nissan. When he had become a worker there more than forty years earlier, as a very young man, it had been a small company. Now it was a huge organization, and he was one of its most trusted and most senior workers. He had been through all the terrible times, the strike, the postwar years when there was not enough work, and the early sixties when there was too much work, the terrible years when he was working night shifts and he had not been able to sleep. He was very proud of his part in so great an enterprise, and while he did not exaggerate what he had accomplished, for he knew that it was small, he also knew that it was only because of men like him, thousands of them, that Nissan and Japan had been so successful. What he was really proud of was his generation, which had suffered so much during the war and then had come back to help restore Japan to a proper place in the world. It was not something he went around saying, for he was not an immodest man, but it was something that he quietly felt. That Japan had scored this remarkable triumph in America, that the Americans were now beginning to study Japanese means of production, made him very proud.

  He felt, too, that he had been amply rewarded by the richness of his career; the company had even sent him to Mexico and other foreign lands to speak to Nissan workers there. To his great surprise, however, there was to be one additional reward. In May 1979, Tanaka, then sixty-four years old, was told by his superiors that because of the excellence of his work for so long a time and, above all, because of the model he had been to other workers, he would receive a special award. It was the Oju Hosho, the Medal with the Yellow Ribbon, and, most miraculously, it came from the Emperor himself.

  This would of course be the most important moment in Tanaka’s life. The day before the ceremony, he went to the barber. That evening he took the longest bath he could ever remember and scrubbed himself very thoroughly. He slept scarcely at all, and the next morning he was up at dawn. He put on the new white shirt his nieces had given him, and the new pair of shoes he had bought, and the formal morning coat and trousers that he had gotten from a rental shop, with his daughter’s assistance. He felt a little awkward in these clothes—they were not, after all, proper for so simple a man—but he knew it was all right to do this, to rent the morning coat and wear it, because he was going to meet the Emperor. Then he went before the small altar in his house and thought of his late wife and told her he was ready for this day. Long before the chauffeur-driven sedan pulled up, he was ready.

  He was taken first to the Ministry of Labor, where he waited with all the others who were going to receive an award. Some of the other men were quite famous, people whom Tanaka had read about in the newspapers or seen on television. It seemed incongruous that he was there waiting with them, as if some frightening mistake had been made and he would soon be found out. The minister of labor gave him a certificate and then the medal itself. Then Tanaka and the others were driven in a bus to the Imperial Palace, where they entered a great hall. Eventually the Emperor arrived and started to climb the stage. He was very old, and Tanaka was struck by how fragile he looked. He worried whether the Emperor could make the steps. If he collapsed and fell, Tanaka wondered, whose job would it be to help him? Then he concentrated on what was happening, on the fact that it was happening to him, that he was standing in front of the Emperor, and he thought again of his wife, wishing that she were alive and were with him on this special day.

  The Emperor praised all the medal winners, and one of them in turn thanked him. Then they toured the palace garden. They were given cigarettes with the mark of the imperial chrysanthemum on them, and although he did not smoke, Tanaka kept the cigarettes so he could give them to his friends at work. That night there were parties. First there was one given by his family. All the members of his family t
old him how proud they were of him. Then there was a party given by Nissan at the New Grand Hotel, perhaps the fanciest in all Yokohama. Several hundred people had been invited, almost all of them Tanaka’s superiors. At this party he finally began to cry. Some of his closest friends from work were also there, and they accompanied him to the third party of the evening, their own. It was a wonderful evening for Tanaka. Afterward he sometimes found it difficult to believe that it had happened, that his own life had meant so much, that although Nissan had been a company for fifty years, he was the only Nissan employee who had ever won the Medal of the Yellow Ribbon.