Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  Tent City didn’t last long, but its appearance on the capitol lawn proved Coleman Young’s prophecy. Tent City was the Occupy movement, an entire generation before it arrived on Wall Street. Its instigators were lower-class, uneducated, black, and Michiganders—four categories of people who felt the consequences of postindustrial America’s economic inequality years before they filtered up to middle-class, college-educated white New Yorkers.

  After the circus of the unemployed left town, Lansing’s homeless returned to their usual hideouts: the City Rescue Mission beneath the neon cross, where a hot meal cost only a sermon about sin. If they had a few dollars, they slept at Jan’s Rooms, the flophouse next door. If they were thirsty, they drank next to the fish ladder on the Grand River. There, they could hide in the bushes along the bank if the cops came by, or ogle the dancers from the strip club at the end of the park, who came outside for a smoke break on a summer evening shift. Michigan’s homeless had one advantage over the homeless everywhere else in America: the ten-cent bottle deposit meant a dozen empties could be transformed into a full can of Colt 45 malt liquor. To accomplish this dregs-into-beer miracle, men would stir garbage bins, listening for the hollow clank of aluminum. They toted the empties in trash bags, bending beneath the load. The best thing was, they could redeem their discoveries at the party store, for credit. It was a one-stop job, cans for beer, with no cash involved in the transaction.

  I turned twenty-five in the winter of 1992, and it seemed the members of my postautomotive generation couldn’t buy or beg their way into a decent job. The nation was in its first Bush recession (that was George I, the lean patrician with the plate-glass spectacles whose administration also brought us the Gulf War, gangsta rap, the Seattle Sound, and the Los Angeles riots). General Motors was exactly halfway between one of its decennial hiring binges, when it replaced a worn-out crew of gray-haired Bob Seger look-alikes with a fresh group of dark-haired Bob Seger look-alikes. (Seger, in his middle age, put on weight, cut his hair, and began wearing wire-framed glasses, which made him look exactly like a UAW retiree. This allowed him to perform “Makin’ Thunderbirds” with a straight face, even though he was from Ann Arbor—the least-blue-collar city in Michigan—and had never operated a machine more complicated than a microphone.) By 1992, the average autoworker was forty-six years old, which meant an approximate hire date of 1966. When GM began hiring again, it allowed every worker to recommend one applicant. This meant, of course, that the $20+/hour shop jobs became the inheritance of a working-class aristocracy.

  At roughly the same age Don Cooper had built his house on three acres, I was earning $4.25 an hour at Video to Go.

  A year before, the video store manager would have looked at my résumé (B.A. English, Michigan State University) and asked, “Why would someone like you want a job like this?” But this was the fall of 1991, and it was understood that these were desperate times. And desperate men were desperate to shelve copies of City Slickers.

  I quit the video store after the manager accused me of treating the job as a joke. After that, I stood beside a conveyor belt, separating trash at a recycling plant; canvassed for the city directory; hoisted cinder blocks at a cement factory; and delivered windshields. At least I could tell my parents and friends, “There are no jobs out there,” and receive a sympathetic reply. If I had tried that dodge in 1966, I would have heard “[Fill in any business in the Yellow Pages] is hiring. Go down there and help build the Great Society.” In the sixties, there was so much work that the hippies had to construct an alternate system of morality to justify their indolence. “I’m not going to work to support a system that’s carrying on an immoral war in Vietnam and pigs blah Mao blah.” Back in the hippie days, being too lazy to get a job was intellectually rigorous. (This was the difference between a Generation X-er in San Francisco and a Generation X-er in Michigan. They felt they’d been born too late for the Sexual Revolution. We felt we’d been born too late for the Industrial Revolution.)

  In spite of the auto industry’s decline, young people could still find assembly-line work in Michigan. It had nothing to do with cars, though. During my summer as a minimum-wage jerk-of-all-trades, I answered a newspaper ad for “assemblers” and ended up putting together Easter fruit baskets for Meijer, the supermarket chain. Some of my co-workers had serious experience working on the line. My supervisor had been laid off from a factory. He was building baskets because “it beats watching soap operas.” The guy who wrapped the baskets in cellophane was an ex–Oldsmobile shop rat who had lost his job when he refused a transfer to GM’s Saturn plant in Tennessee.

  “In Lansing, they give you just enough to get by,” complained a friend of mine who drove a forklift. “Enough to live on, but not enough to save and move on to something better.”

  That summer, I finally came to the conclusion that eventually strikes every son of a dying town: life is elsewhere.

  Before I left, General Motors gave me another reason to go. In 1991, the company lost $4.5 billion, the reddest year for any corporation in American history. As a result, GM would have to close eleven more plants. The biggest would be in either Arlington, Texas, or Willow Run, Michigan. The Willow Run plant had been constructed during World War II by Henry Ford, to build B-24 Liberator bombers. More than any other industrial facility, Willow Run had contributed to Michigan’s title as the Arsenal of Democracy. GM bought the plant, and now four thousand workers built Buicks, Chevrolets, and Oldsmobiles there.

  GM closed Willow Run. The workers in Texas were willing to accept ten-hour shifts, which meant lower overtime costs. It was rumored that President Bush had lobbied GM’s chairman, promising to push for the North American Free Trade Agreement if his home state’s plant stayed open. Every plant GM closed was in the Rust Belt. Moraine, Ohio, lost an engine plant to Mexico. Danville, Illinois, lost a foundry; Tarrytown, New York, lost 3,456 jobs building Chevy Luminas, Pontiac Trans Sports, and Oldsmobile Silhouettes; Flint lost a V-8 engine plant that employed 4,000 workers.

  When the workers at Willow Run heard the announcement from a GM executive, they threw coffee cups at the stage and cursed out the messenger in the suit and tie.

  “There was no way I could work,” said a thirty-four-year-old auto-worker who’d gotten his job in 1977, the last of the salad years. “It was just like somebody just ripped my heart out. Maybe I should go work for the Japanese. They’re the ones with the smart management.”

  But the quote I never forgot was an epitaph written by a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. The Michigan Way of Life—boats! Cottages! Waterbeds! Motorcycles! Painted vans! Florida vacations! Deer hunting trips! Durable marriages!—had been based on the fact that a young man could get a job in an auto plant and keep that job for thirty years or until his body gave out, whichever came first. After Willow Run, a newspaperman dismissed that dream with three words:

  “It is over.”

  9.

  The Smell of Money

  Decatur, Illinois, sweetens the world. If, in the past thirty-five years, you’ve drunk a 7UP, a Dr Pepper, a grape Nehi, a Squirt, a Pepsi, or an Orange Crush, you know the cloying taste of the high-fructose corn syrup produced by the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company, which is to Decatur what Ford is to Detroit, what Harley-Davidson is to Milwaukee, what John Deere is to Moline. The city and the company are inseparable. When, in 1920, Decatur fielded a franchise in the new National Football League (an outfit founded in the broken-nose towns of the industrial Midwest), it was nicknamed the Staleys and coached by a Staley employee, George Halas. The Staleys won their first game, 20–0, over the Moline Tractors, won that fall’s professional football championship, then moved upstate to Chicago, where they were renamed the Bears. Drive into Decatur on one of the four-lane prairie highways that approach the city from every cardinal and ordinal direction, making it the focus of a cats’ cradle of asphalt, and you’ll pass signs that proclaim, “Pride of the Prairie” and “Original Home of the Chicago Bears.” A sugar substitute and a footbal
l team are Decatur’s contributions to American culture.

  The process that produces such sweetness, however, also generates a starchy aroma that is the chief olfactory sensation on the east side of Decatur, where the Staley factory, a smoky puzzle of pipes and chimneys, unfurls its banners of steam. The odor is as inescapable as the weather, and as various. On fair days, it smells like a toasting corn flake; on foul, like a lump of falafel burning in the oven. You can leave Decatur, but the smell goes with you, clinging to the cilia of your nostrils. When visitors or newcomers mention the stench to a native, they receive a defensive response—“That smells like money to some people,” or “I just say it’s someone’s bread and butter and let it go at that.” The words are spoken in tones that make the outsider understand that mentioning the smell is as uncalled for as asking about the heritage of a teenage daughter’s baby, or about a son’s unexpected return from basic training. Some things should be discussed only by family. Academic studies have found that Decatur’s children suffer high rates of asthma, but those studies do not appear in the local newspaper, the Herald & Review.

  Decatur’s other pungent industrial concern is the Archer Daniels Midland Company. ADM was for decades dominated by Dwayne Andreas, a tiny millionaire who moved his company from Minneapolis to Decatur because in addition to its corn, it is also the Soybean Capital of the World. (The radio station is named WSOY, the Soy Capital Bank is the town’s lending leader, and on Eldorado Street, pronounced El-duh-RAY-do by settlers who had only read about the Mexican War in a newspaper, is the Soy City Motel.) Were there knighthoods in America, Andreas would have been dubbed Sir Dwayne. One of America’s most effulgent political donors, he has vacationed in Florida with Thomas Dewey, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Dole, and Tip O’Neill. At his mansion on a bluff above Lake Decatur (actually a dammed-up bend of the Sangamon River), he entertained even more powerful company: Mikhail Gorbachev. Near the end of his Soviet leadership, when the USSR had become everything George Orwell predicted in Animal Farm, the world’s leading Communist slept under the same roof as Decatur’s leading capitalist.

  Lairds such as Andreas can only exist atop peasant societies. Decatur is a city without a middle class. When I moved to Decatur in the early 1990s, to take a job as a newspaper reporter, there was Sir Dwayne, a crust of white-collar lieutenants who lived in Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie houses and belonged to the Decatur Country Club, and below them, a vast proletariat. In the neighborhood between the corn and soy processing plants were square bungalows, jacketed against the elements in aluminum siding. Rottweilers and dirty-maned chows patrolled behind cyclone fences, barking hammering alarms whenever a rare pedestrian passed along the dirt shoulder of the street. The chain-link fences enclosing the yards were hung with sullenly humorous signs: “THIS PROPERTY GUARDED BY WORLD’S MEANEST ATTACK DOG,” or for those allergic to pets: “PROPERTY INSURED BY SMITH & WESSON.” In the driveways were plastic tricycles, tyke-sized BMX bikes lying on their sides, pickup trucks carrying smoke-windowed caps on their backs, Camaros and Firebirds from model years past.

  Decatur is either the southernmost Northern city in America or the northernmost Southern city. As an industrial town, connected economically to Chicago and its soybean-trading pits, Decatur is part of the Rust Belt. But most of its industrial workers have roots in Southern Illinois (the whites) or Brownsville, Tennessee, (the blacks), which makes it part of the Bible Belt. Wednesdays were church nights. A “cookie patrol” picketed downtown’s only adult bookstore, handing out wholesome baked goods to horny men. According to the “Letters” page of the Herald & Review, Scripture both prohibited interracial marriage and required gun ownership. Although Abraham Lincoln’s first Illinois cabin was just outside Decatur, the city’s racial structure had been imported from the South as well. Few whites were outspokenly racist, but racial epithets had not disappeared from conversation. More common were expressions such as those of an old police sergeant who lamented, “They just have a different culture, that’s all.” Closely linked to their roots, Decatur’s blacks never developed a professional elite, unlike Chicago’s. Barbecue wagons sold ribs and chicken on street corners every summer. Old men fished in gravel pits, sitting on overturned buckets. A twenty-one-year-old woman without a baby was an old maid.

  Decatur was the most urban farm town or the most rural metropolis. The countryside didn’t serve the city, the city served the countryside, converting its crop to corn syrup, table syrup, cornstarch, animal feed, ethanol, and soybean oil. In the summers, Decatur teenagers “walked beans,” pulling weeds from between the rows of soybean plants that look like overgrown clover, fluttering in the unbroken prairie wind. (Central Illinois is so flat and so farmed-over that the landscape is a map of itself. You find your way to the next village by driving toward the grain elevators shining above the dirt horizon.)

  In 1902, a Baltimore starch manufacturer named Augustus Eugene Staley was induced to buy a factory in Central Illinois with the promise that “all the corn you’ll ever need is within seventy-five miles of Decatur.” Staley handed the business—and the brick mansion he’d built in the middle of Decatur—to his son A. E. Jr. The paternalistic heir believed that one of his company’s raisons d’être was providing jobs for Decatu-rites, even during hard times. Once, the story goes, Gus Jr. saw a tramp walking past the factory. Grabbing a broom, he hurried outside and hired the man to sweep floors.

  “I knew A. E. Staley Jr. personally,” said Mike Griffin, who worked twenty-eight years in the Staley plant. “He was a decent person. Mr. Staley regarded it as his responsibility to keep Decatur employed.”

  A.E. Jr. gave Griffin a job. Griffin was a coal miner’s son from Kincaid, Illinois. His grandfather had been involved in the Mine Wars of the 1920s, when striking miners killed 19 strikebreakers in Herrin, 150 miles south of Decatur, in the region of the state known as Little Egypt. The perpetrators of the Herrin Massacre were acquitted by sympathetic local juries—how else was a family man supposed to treat a scab who had taken his job? Griffin’s brother worked in the mines, but Mike didn’t want to go down there himself. A man lost his identity in that hole. In a family portrait of four generations of Griffins, standing outside the opening of the Pawnee Mine in Kincaid, the faces were so black it was impossible to tell great-grandfather from grandfather from father from son. After dropping out of high school, Griffin joined the marine corps, which sent him to Vietnam in 1965. Returning stateside a year later, Griffin got engaged to a woman he’d met at Camp Lejeune, so he needed a job. His stepmother’s brother-in-law knew someone at Staley, “and they hired [him], partially because [he] was a veteran.”

  Since Staley believed in doing its own maintenance, rather than jobbing out to a nonunion company, Griffin apprenticed as a millwright, getting the education he had not been provided in a mining town or the marine corps. He learned mathematics, blueprint reading, and drafting at Richland Community College, a campus surrounded by a soybean field and within Staley’s radius of olfactory influence, at least when the wind was blowing north.

  Four years after Griffin joined Staley, his union, Allied Industrial Workers Local 837, walked out for eighty-two days when Staley demanded it give up the right to strike over grievances and instead submit to binding arbitration. The union surrendered, and seven workers were fired for sabotaging company property along the picket line, but most of the survivors didn’t take the defeat personally.

  “They were tough,” Griffin said, “but you could work things out.”

  To Griffin, the relationship between the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Co. and its hometown began to lose its sentimental feeling when A. E. Jr.’s health failed and none of his sons would take over the family business. Instead, the heir was a company attorney who merged Staley with Continental Foods, moved the headquarters to a suburb of Chicago, and outsourced packaging of consumer products. Instead of leaving Decatur in bottles and table jugs, Staley syrup left in fifty-five-gallon drums and tank cars for Chicago, where the company could hire low-wag
e immigrants to bottle it.

  In 1988, Staley was purchased by the British sugar conglomerate Tate & Lyle, which had built a fortune on Caribbean cane plantations. While the company’s business interests had matured since then—by the time it took over Staley, Tate & Lyle was the world’s largest sugar manufacturer, with interests in shipbuilding, finance, insurance, and rum—its attitude toward labor had not.

  Staley’s workers began to sour on Tate & Lyle after the death of a maintenance engineer named Jim Beals, who suffocated when propylene oxide filled a cornstarch processing tank he was repairing. The fatal gas leaked into the tank from a reactor that was supposed to have been shut down during maintenance. There were two reactors in the starch building. The old rule had been that whenever one was under repair, both had to be idled to prevent an exchange of chemicals. When Beals and his co-workers pointed out the safety regulation, the supervisor told them, “We don’t need to shut that down. Those reactors are separate. We can isolate this one from the other one and do the work.”

  At the time, the president of Local 837 was Dave Watts, a carpenter who was as broad, gruff, and industrious as a Lord of the Rings dwarf. Watts’s mustache, its black and white whiskers an illustration of middle age’s tensions, traced a tight frown on his square, rubicund face. Like Griffin, Watts was a Vietnam veteran who had been hired right out of service. He’d been elected president because the union’s contract was expiring in 1992 and the members thought he was just the hard-ass to stand up to their new British overlords.