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>> for a complete schedule visit booktv.org. >> now on booktv, edward mcclelland reports on america's industrial midwest, also known as the rust belt. the author examines the region's once-powerful manufacturing centers and how their demise has resulted in the exodus of local populations in search of employment. it's about an hour. [applause] >> thank you. that was a really good introduction because it segways right into what i wanted to talk about at the beginning which was the fisher body plant in its heyday. it was, i went to high school across the street from the fisher body plant in lansing, michigan, and it was perfectly integrated into the industrial life of the state. the high school was part of the supply chain. it would provide the workers for

industrial labor. and there was a saying that you had a diploma in your hand one week and a ratchet in your hand the next week. people would just walk right across the street two weeks after graduation, and they'd have a job. and when i was going to school, i remember inhaling paint fumes as i ran on the track. there was sort of -- it was just this sweetish chemical odor and seeing workers standing on the balcony during friday night football games. and, of course, there was a bar across from every entrance. the prologue is called gus' bar, and it's about gus who 'em grated to lansing in 1960 because an american consul told him the most jobs were in michigan, so he figured that was the most promising place. by the time i started high school in 1982, the unemployment rate in michigan was 14%, and one of our chemistry teachers used to begin his classes every

semester by telling us it used to be that you didn't have to study here, but those days are over. now you guys are going to have to study hard and go to college. so i studied hard and went to college, and even after that i didn't get a good job. i remember being fascinated by stories from baby boom with autoworkers about how easy they'd had it finding work. i read a story in the "detroit free press" about a young guy who was pumping gas in flint, and a driver took down his name and number, and a week later he got a call telling him to report for work. gm had a couple nicknames, one was the general, and the other was generous motors because at that point, this was in the early '70s. at that point the workers had a deal where they could work for 30 years and retire on full

benefits no matter what age they were, and they had health care for the rest of their lives. that's over, too, which we'll get to later. this was like employment porn. i have one anecdote in the book about one of my high school friends who came home from the army and started getting a hard time from the his dad because he didn't have a job. so my friend larry had to tell his dad kids these days don't have it as easy as you did dad. and larry said i think you have to know if everyone had the same opportunity you did to just walk into a personnel office, fill out a piece of paper, get a job the same day, we'd all be there. larry eventually made it to general motors, but i think it took him about ten years, and he had to work in several other manufactureing plants.

he's a fireman, and he works for a subcontractor. another guy i profiled was don cooper who runs a classic car show. he aggravated assaulted from high school in 1965 -- he graduated from high school in 1965. and his job search consisted of cutting classes one afternoon. he hired in on september 13, 1965, which was gm's largest hiring day since world war ii, and it was just as the vietnam war was cranking up. vietnam was the perfect little war for general motors because it was big enough to provide $750 million a year in defense contracts, but it wasn't so big that the company couldn't build cars too, it wasn't a total war. from 1965-1969 there was not a single month where the unemployment rate was higher than 4% in the united states. the hippies had to create an entire alternative morality to

justify their indolence. so don got married and bought a house when he was 20 years old and went on to work 37 years after general motors, so his whole life course was basically set right out of high school. and one thing he told me was that the baby boomers, he beliefs, will be -- believes, will be the last generation to earn more than their parents did. so part of this is a generational story. in 2006 fisher body was torn down, and while the work was going on i saw a sign on the fence that said "demolition means progress" which i thought was kind of orwellian. and now it looks like a cross between nagasaki and the badlands. and bus, who had done -- and gus, who had done so much business for 20-some years, actually, it would have been almost 40 years, from general motors workers had to lay off all 14 of his waitresses the week after the plant closed. because he went from guys shoving money across the bar to

having his only customers being the retired workers who lived in the rooms he rented above the bar. so the book was also an attempt to find out what happened to the factories that defined our communities in the midwest. and as i researched the book, i realized it was also a biography of the american middle class. and that's mostly what i want to talk about today, because one of the points i tried to mix -- make in this book is the nation's economic trends originate here in the midwest. this was the birthplace, and this is becoming the graveyard of the middle class. this is where henry ford started paying his workers $5 a day so they could afford to buy the cars they were building and where the flint sit-down strike took plaits which led to the -- place which led to auto workers movement.

no product had more value during production than the automobile. the first interpret is about everett ketcham. i'm going to talk about how his life reflected the prosperity of the mid century middle class. one of the last surviving sit-down strikers, everett not only participated in the battle that founded the piddle class, he enjoyed all the spoils of the peace that followed. everett earned $27 an hour in the 1970s, more than any of the necktied budget analysts in lansing's mazes of state government cubicles. only a year less than he worked in the shop.

without the benefits the uaw won from general motors, everett would have lived out his old age as an unwanted uncle. he's deciding 100 years will be enough life. after gm went bankrupt in 2008, i told him his superannuation, both the result and cause of consumption of health benefits, was personally responsible for gm's financial crisis. everett cackled. i don't know where i'd be living without it, he said. my two sisters is gone. i really don't know where i'd be if i didn't have where i had. how long are my benefits going to last because i'm not working? all the money i got is interest money i saved think the years. in his own lifetime, which began three months after world war i broke out, everett went from northern michigan farm boy to autoworker to prosperous pensioner.

and flint went from a small town where building cars was a cottage industry to the city with the highest per capita income in the united states to a depopulated slum with the highest murder rate in the nation. how did all this happen? everett's father wanted to be a farmer, but he congress make corn and beans grow -- but he couldn't make corn and beans grow, so he drove a horse and buggy around the countryside trading goods for milk, potatoes and eggs. when america entered the great war, it was join the army of work in factory, so earl moved his family to flint where he built buicks. by the early 20th century, flint was already on its third great industry, each a descendant of the last. in 1865 a saw mill began operating on the flint live. once the forests were exhausted, flint used the timber to become the carriage-making capital.

a scottish-born tinkerer named buick formed the country that became general motors. for a factory town, war meant work. in the teens and '20s, flint's population quadrupled. gm headhunters sought out dirt farmers all over the midwest and the mississippi valley handing them one-way tickets to the vehicle city as flint nicknamed itself. the newcomers slept in shacks, tents and railroad cars. earl's family rented a tiny house, all he could afford on his factory pay. after the war earl tried farming again, failed again and returned to flint for good. everett grew up a city boy with no agricultural ambitions. after graduating from high school in 1933, he enlisted in general motors as an apprentice tool and dye maker at 50 cents an hour. the job could disappear in a day. if a supervisor wanted to hire his brother-in-law, he created ap opening by handing a worker a

yellow slip, the color of termination. bachelors were laid off while married men with lower seniority kept their jobs. the supervision, they had no control either, everett recalled. you could come in today and have a desk and have a yellow slip on there that said you're all done. on november 12th, three welders conducted a short pro-union sit-down demonstration. in protest, a department in the plant stopped working. the plant manager agreed to meet with the uaw representative who told him production would not are assume until the militant welders returned to work. the next 500 autoworkers signed up with the union that had prevented the firings. the uaw high command had planned a strike for january when michigan's newly-elected new deal golf, frank murphy, would be sworn in.

but the week after christmas, the company forced the union's hand. gm was about to ship dyes to grand rapids and pontiac. suddenly, flint went on strike. at 10 p.m. the night shift stopped working and refused to go home. the sit-down strike had begun. e rent was -- e -- when the strike spread, everett asked the supervisor whether he should keep working on join the union. join it, his foreman told him, you need it. the sit-down strike was the most important event of everett's career. it made his working man's fortune possible and was the source of his long life. there was never a better time to work for general motors than the 1940s through the 170s. -- 1970s. after gm recognized the uaw,

everett received a pension plan and health insurance. during world war ii he stayed out of combat by building armored trucks for chevrolet. once the war was won, flint was booming. they even bussed people up from the south. everybody was working, everybody had a job, everybody had one or two car, and you kept getting bigger homes. oh, boy. america's greatest 20th century invention was not the airplane or the atomic bomb or the lunar lander, it was the middle class. we won the cold war not because of our military strength, but because we shared our wealth more broadly than the communists and, as a result, had more wealth to share. everett has a depression boy's gratitude for his good fortune. born half a century later, i assumed universal prosperity was a natural progress of human life. i'm begunking to assume -- i'm beginning to assume otherwise. in which the massive humankind

had been born with saddles on their back to be ridden by a booted and spurred air stockily si. collective bargaining made obsolete the iron law of wages which stated that labor could command no more than a subsis tense living from capital. it made obsolete bidding at the factory gate in which workers offered their services for ten cents an hour only to lose a job to a more desperate pan who would take nine. -- man who would take nine. perhaps we have to ask when the golden age of the american worker was a historical aberration made possible by the fact that we were the only country to emerge from world war ii with any industrial capacity. was that golden age destined to end as soon as the rest of the world rebuilt itself making blue collar workers an obsolete class? in this global century, will laborers have to reconcile themselves to the roles of an

international peasantry? was the american middle class just a moment in -- just that moment? america's never again going to be as wealthy as it was in the '50s and '60s because we had no economic tet to haves. the rest of the world was still digging itself out from the damage inflicted during world war ii. and, of course, the countries that became our greatest competitors were the countries we defeated during that war. we paid to rebuild their infrastructure so they had more modern factories, and we took over responsibility for their defense. over here our best engineers were going into defense and aerospace because that's where the best government contracts were. their best engineers or were building cars. and the event that really put an end to the geometric expansion of the american way of life was the arab oil embargo of 1973, and that was the consequence of world war ii, which was the

protection of israel. after we sent arms to israeling, there's a local connection here. [laughter] saudi arabia cut off our oil supply. the the price of a gallon of gas went from 36 cents to 53 cents a gallon, and filling stations started rationing gas. so if you had a license plate that ended in an odd number, you could get it on monday, wednesday, or friday, even numbers on tuesday, thursday or saturday. and this was at a time when the average american car got 13 miles to the gallon. so i owned a 1972 chevy impala 20 years after the fact, and it had to be 20 feet long. it was a rolling motel. [laughter] i drove it from michigan to california and slept comfortably in the backseat. and so not surprisingly, people wanted cars they didn't have to fill up every day, but the american auto companies didn't want to build small cars.

they'd just signed a contract allowing the workers to retire after 30 years at any age with health benefits for life, and there budget enough profit margin in small cars to pay for those benefits. and they really believed only flaky people out in california wanted to drive tote that's and vocessing wagons. ford decided or calculated it would be cheaper to pay off the lawsuits that resulted from it catching on fire than to fit the tank with a plastic liner to prevent it from spewing fuel. there was an actual memo that was discovered by mother jones magazine. i think they did actuarial calculations. they say an actuary puts a value on human life, and they did in this case. the vega leaked oil, so the american auto companies lost an entire generation of drivers with cars like that and the che

vet and's corps, and both of the head gaskets blew up. so even though the quality of american small cars has caught up, there are still people who won't touch them. and the recession of the early '80s which i call the first great recession -- it was not nationwide like the one we just had, but it was deeper here than i think even the recent recession. it was sort of confined to the midwest. that was a result of the disruption of the oil supply caused by the iranian revolution and the anti-inflationary interest rates set by president carter. people couldn't afford the gas to fill a car or alone to buy one with. they couldn't afford a new house either. and all this had a terrible effect on the steel mills which sold half their product to the auto industry. and so this next interpret is about what happened to -- excerpt is ant what happened to a chicago steel worker in the mid '60s and about how the steel crisis there led to the

launching of barack obama's career as a community organizer. so that's the tie-in to the previous book i wrote which is called young mr. obama, chicago and the making of a black president. okay. this is from a chapter titled a rust bowl, and the term rust belt was actually originally rust bowl. and the first usage i found for it was in "time" magazine, and it was popularized by walter mondale when he accused president reagan of turning the midwest into a rust bowl, and then it was alter inside the way of journalism to match the sunbelt and whatever other belts we have. the term -- >> the bible belt, yeah. >> the term before the rust belt was the frost belt. anyway, on the east side of chicago, life did not run according to the laws that nature imposed on the rest of the world. when night fell on other

neighborhoods, those neighborhoods stayed dark until the next morning. on the east side, the night sky burned red when u.s. steel, republic steel or wisconsin steel dumped the waste product of steel making. the steel mills created their own suns, skies and weather. in other neighborhoods, housewives hung their washing in the basement when it rained. on the east side, wives hung it inside when the wind blew in from the mills. the air on the sidewalks glittered with a metallic mist so thick you could take a spoon and get ahold of it. visitors remarked on a musty odor, but the sense of steel making was as natural an atmosphere as oxygen. men didn't go to work when the sun rose and came home when it set, today pulled a different shift every week. so when you went up on 106th

street, all the doors were open, and marino would sell you a 12-pack of beer, damn the city's two a.m. license. rob stanley was born on the east side in 1947, two years after his father came home from the war. of english and welsh descent, stanley was an exotic in his ethnic neighborhood. his playmates called him catholic killer. as a student at chicago vocational high school, stanley never thought about going to college, because steel workers made more money than chemistry teachers. he thought about rumbling with negro gangs from across the river and playing football. about 5% of my class went to college, stanley said. a lot of the guys on the east side didn't have plans. what happened is you were just enjoying life, going out. our plan was to get a better team, get better ball players and make enough money to get a car and make it to our games. when stanley graduated in 1965,

he had to pay represent or get kicked out ott of father's house, so he walked over to one of the steel mills. it was the worst job, but it paid $2.32 an hour, enough for an apartment and a car. you'd go apply, he said. there was so much work, especially during vietnam. when i quit to go over to republic, they hired 50 guys that day. you'd always see guys with new helmets walking around. the vietnam war made it easily for stanley to get hired as a grunt but impossible to enroll in a years' long apprentice program. one afternoon in 1966 as stanley was driving home from work with, a friend pulled up alongside his car, i just got drafted, he shouted, and so did you. sure enough, when stanley arrived home, the same envelope -- the envelope every noncollegiate 19-year-old male received that year -- was waiting in the mailbox. and that's another reason

unemployment was so high especially in industry because the young blue collar males were being drafted and sent to the army. stanley's time in country lasted only a year, but the war lasted longer so there was still plenty of work when he came home. for two years he was part of building a blast furnace at u.s. steel. he figured he had his whole life to work in the steel mill, so he wrote letters to international construction companies hoping to find a job that would take him back to hong kong where he'd r and r'd during the war. then he got his girlfriend pregnant which would keep him on the east side forever. he'd just gotten back from vietnam and had big plans for traveling the world. stanley needed something more than a job on a shovel crew. he needed a career like his father who put in 39 years at u.s. steel before retiring after open heart surgery. in 1970, stanley began at

wisconsin steel. he didn't know it, nobody knew then, but he could not have hired in at a worse time. wisconsin steel was, had been purchased by international harvester in 1902. fearing price gouging, the farm equipment manufacturer wanted a mill to produce plate and bar steel for its assembly plants. a labor dispute killed off wisconsin steel. on november 1, 1979, workers at international harvester's plants went on strike. international harvester was still wisconsin steel's biggest customer purchasing 40% of the mill's output. when stanley showed up for work on march 27, 1980, television news crews were gathered outside the gate. you never want to see that when you're coming to work. did you hear what happened, a coworker asked? it's closed. stanley couldn't believe it.

wisconsin steel had been in the neighborhood for three generations. how could an institution like that close? as stanley left the mill carrying his bag of clean clothes, a foreman told him we'll contact you if something changes. nothing ever changed. march 27th was the last day stanley and his 3400 coworkers ever spent inside wisconsin steel. the mill was bankrupt. stanley's last two paychecks bounced. he'd worked there for nine and a half years, six months short of what would have qualified him for a pension. he got a check for -- 700. stanley had been earning $10 an hour in the milker but once he was -- mill, but once he was laid off, he had to get by with whatever he could pick up. he even wrote a letter to the chicago bears asking for a tryout, but the team turned him down. his ex-wife had remarried to an he can tradition with a house and a boat, so he told her i can't pay what i've been paying

you, so i'll just take my daughter and buy her clothes or whatever. stanley and a few buddies from wisconsin steel caught out at a coal mill in indiana, but after seven months he was laid off again. two layoffs in one year seemed hike a message that the steel industry in chicago had no more use for rob stanley, so he moved to houston. the high gasoline prices destroying the auto and steel industries had rained prosperity on texas. an out of work auto executive drove to houston every weekend and filled his trunk with sunday papers. back in detroit he resold the want ads to union men. stanley took $6.50 an hour to stand on a wobbly scaffold with a bunch of illegal aliens. after houston he tried california, enrolling in a bartending school. when the classes ended his instructor told him, i think you'd be better off looking on your own. so rob stanley, a steel worker who hadn't made steel for over three years, wandered back home to the east side more no other

reason than it was spring, and softball was about to start. on a 36 -- as a 36-year-old bachelor, unemployment didn't bother him that much. if his car wasn't running, one of his teammates would always drive him to a game, and eventually he found a new job as a plumber for the federal government, but he really had to start his whole retirement savings over again at age 40. so it's taking him a lot longer to retire than he expected originally. so the last excerpt i'll read a is about what happens to a city after its middle class disappears. this is about chiefland -- cleveland which was the cradle of the housing crisis that ended up sinking the entire american economy in 2008. i have to go back a little bit because i didn't explain about barack obama. i'm sorry about that. he was hired in chicago to

work -- i'll go back here. in the suburb of call you met city, two towns south t of the east side, desperate steel workers turned for help to their priest. father leo mann was so distressed by their plight that he organized a conference which won a $100,000 grant. in 1985 the conference was looking for a black organizer to serve its inner city chapter. the group took out an advertisement in a magazine called community jobs. the ad was read by a 23-year-old columbia university graduate at the new york public library. thus, the shutdown of wisconsin steel brought barack obama to chicago where he began his rise to the presidency of the united states. obama counseled steel workers still in denial about the disappearance of their industry. blue collar aristocrats, they planned to ride out their layoffs. in the past they'd always gone on strike, returned to work and

earned more money than ever. why would it be different this time? the brightest were retrained as computer programmers, the less fortunate at the sherwin williams paint factory or brach's candy. all right, so i'll go back to cleveland here. okay. so slavic village. yes, this was the cradle of the housing crisis that ended up sinking the entire american economy in 2008 which is another reason to pay anticipation to what's going on -- attention to what's going on in the midwest. slavicville ram was first settle inside the 19th century by poles, czechs and bohemians who were imported to break a strike at one of the mills, one of those self-contained ethnic ghettos where you could speak the old word language and follow customs, you could be baptized, married, work, drink and worship and be buried all within a few square miles. that started to break up after world war ii when young families

began moving to the suburbs. when their parents died, the kids sold out to absentee landlords, and you started hearing people say my grandmother grew up in slavic village, but the neighborhood has changed, which is cleveland code for black people are moving in. or there's another code which is the element is moving in. so in the 2000s, slavic villages population fell 27% on its way down from 70,000 to 20,000, and those unwanted houses attracted speculators and house flippers. ohio had some of the weakest lending laws in the nation. so ameriquest ip evented the stated income loan which means if a borrower said he earned a hundred grand a year, the lender took his word for it. [laughter] so the result of all this was that by 2006 903 of slavic

village's 944 properties were in foreclosure, the highest rate of any zip code in the nation. and this next excerpt is about what it's like to live in a neighborhood of empty homes. if houses go to heaven, then slavic village has been the site of a mass rapture. ted michaels, a retired trade magazine editor, a bachelor, a man who likes to sit on his por be. and share his neighborhood with the passers by he's known for 50 years, has lived his entire life in the little square house his grandfather bought in 1923. it's the kind of house that used to be good enough for everybody in cleveland. 800 square feet of.com citiesty. he shared it with his brother, another bachelor, who died in 2005. now he's alope. his old school friends want to know why he never followed them

to the suburbs. to them, slavic village the old neighborhood but no longer the neighborhood they grew up in. slavic village is polish. unlike many urban neighborhoods, slavic village only changed halfway. at seven roses the newspapers and lunchtime gossip are about crackhouses in warsaw, and staying in slavic village meant staying in the parish of holy mary. we were working on the sidewalk, about ten people stopped and talked. you don't get that in the suburbs. people don't talk. but he had fewer friends than before the housing crisis. the house next door disappeared first. the couple who lived there pause $17,500 for it when they moved in. they liked to buy stuff, michaels observed, so they borrowed and borrowed against

their equity until in 2004 they lost it to the bank. a fireman picked it up. he painted it and rented it to a woman on section eight who was so clueless about housekeeping that michaels had to mow her lawn. eventually, a corner of the foundation collapsed causing the floor the sink four inches. the tenant moved out, and the house was demolished leaving only the outline of its basement. the same thing happened across the street where an absentee owner bought out. michaels went to court to have the place demolished. frugality was easy for michaels. having inherited his house, he never made a mortgage payment. he was astonished by the appliance repairman who divorced his wife and abandoned his house owing $83,000 and by the speculators who were paying double what the neighbors knew the properties were worth. sometimes we said this is going to

for $86,000? what is going on? the bank wasn't looking at applications. as the loans went bad and houses emptied, the scrappers arrived tearing out furnaces and water pipes right in broad daylight. signs reading this house does not have copper plumbing were posted on windows. but clausen avenue became such a magnet for thieves, they even broke into occupied houses. only a neighbor who mowed the vacant lots prevented clausen avenue from reverting to presettlement prairie. cleveland's pain, the nation's gain. it means a lot of bad stuff happens here, but we hope the rest of america can learn from our misfortune and avoid the same crap. the lenders were so aggressive, they went door to door on the east side of cleveland pointing out loose shingles, collapsing chimneys or sagging porches. money from a second mortgage

could repair any of those defects. they never mentioned the adjustable rates. anita gardener's sons fell for that scam. gardener, who worked 31 years as a welder at trw automotive bought a two-story house on the east side back in the early 1970s. she was -- it was almost paid off when she was diagnosed with a brain disorder that left her too ill to workover even walk up the stairs to her bedroom, so she bought a converted liquor store and signed the old house -- my buckingham palace -- over to her 30-something sons. when gardener had moved in, every house was owned by an auto worker or a steel worker with a wife, four or five children and a new car. then j and l steel closed in 1999. the blue collar workers moved out, and the mortgage brokers

began moving in, attracted by the remaining residents' financial desperation. having lost their paychecks, these dispossessed factory rats were told they still had a source of income in the houses they'd bought cheap and paid off with frugality. this couldn't have happened if people had good jobs, gardener said, or why would they change their mortgage? they were desperate for money. it was targeted. mortgage agents were going door to door, calling on phone. you don't have to have credit, you can have nice things. gardener's sons fell for the pitch. neither had been able to afford nice things. the other brother had served 11 years on a drug charge. when he got out of prison, the only job he could find was delivering furniture for sears. when an agent from countrywide financial whose ceo is in prison now, by the way, offered them a $70,000 mortgage on their mom's almost paid off house, they signed. gardener suspects the agent falsely ip facilitated the home's value -- inflated the

home's value. agents receive bigger commissions for adjustable rate mortgages. the boys used the second mortgage for a shopping spree. a black hyundai sports car, a new couch, a big screen tv, a refrigerator in the garage full of beer. the monthly payments began at $436 a month, but as the boys missed payment, it more than doubled to 950, far more than they can pay on their small time jobs. when the past due amount reaches $4,000, gardener's sons appealed to mom for a bailout. this raises a question, which is the greater social ill: allowing people who can no longer afford their mortgages to stay in their houses thus undermining the credit system by letting people skip out on the payments or evicting people from the houses for which there is no buyer? ted michaels and anita gardener would say let the poor folks stay and look after the house. michaels called the cops on a stripper trying to tear the aluminum drainpipe off a house

at 11:00 in the morning. in a 150 foot radius around a vacant house, property values go down at least $7,000. it's usually denuded of plumbing fixture, boiler, carpeting, sinks, toilet and any architectural sconces that can be peddled. yellow foreclosure stickers and plywood windows are ini invitat. inner city scavengers salvage the last pennies out of a house until demolition. so after all that, i should tell you that my book has a happy ending. [laughter] when i went back to lansing, i found out that the fisher body plant -- whose demolition had helped inspire the book -- had actually been replaced. it was obsolete because it was costing general motors millions of dollars a year.

so they acquired some land out in the country and put the whole operation under one roof. the plant on the grand river, which was 100 years old, was also tomorrow down and replaced and now builds the cadillac ats which was esquire's car of the year and is the best selling cadillac in decades, and it's also going to be building the chevy camaro soon. i think it's interesting to talk about the difference between lansing and flint where gm never replaced the plants it tore down, and auto employment has gone from 80,000 in the late 1970s to 7500 now. and as a result, the town has half the people it had. its murder rate is 60 per 100,000, and to put that in perspective, if new york had the same murder rate as flint, it would have 5,000 murders a year. so when you look at murders of cities in the western hemisphere, flint is up there with latin american drug capitals. but flint, it was in a way crippled by the legacy of the sit-down strike because the

flint autoworkers never let go of that militant spirit. strikes, they were more frequent, and they lasted longer than anywhere else in the gm universe, so gm dispersed its workers to less militant locals. i also discovered a company in lansing which makes particle accelerators for physics experiments and missile defense systems, and the company's president told we lansing was one of the few places he could operate because he'd hired retired fm craftsmen -- gm craftsmen to build the equipment, and there were very few places that had the academic knowledge and the ethic of manual craftsmanship. so i think high-tech manufacturing offers a future for postindustrial cities. another example i found about that was in syracuse, new york. and syracuse used to be the air-conditioning capital of america. and it made the sun belt possible. and as a result, they ended up moving all the jobs down south because that's where the customers were, and the labor

was cheaper. so syracuse invented the appliance that caused its own demise. but i visited a company called mister scroll which made high complexion chillers, and -- compression chillers, and they needed the legacy of craftsmanship and engineering knowledge that was still in the community. and be finally, discuss sold his bar. be i actually ran into him about a month ago. he was working on a house he still owns across the street from the old bar, and i showed him the book, and he said i can't read english, so i'm hoping this book does well enough for there to be a greek edition for gus to read. [laughter] and, actually, if it does generate royalty, i'm going to donate 25% to some of the social service agencies that i wrote about in here such as slavic village development or recovery park which is an urban crop and fish farm in detroit. so i guess -- and as i talk here

about sort of the future of some of these high-tech businesses, i guess i should end with michigan did not become great because of the auto industry, the auto industry became great because of a michigander named henry ford. so i will take any questions now. i guess we have to go up to the microphone. no? you don't have to do that? >> are you familiar with the book "someplace like america"? >> no, i'm not. tell me about it. >> there are two versions of it. a reporter and a photographer from akron did the first book. and that book inspired the springsteen song, and i can't remember the title of it now. >> okay, so was it about -- >> troubled things are in

america. and then are they came out with a second one to check out the people they had interviewed. people had lost their jobs at steel mills and all across the country. >> right. >> they actually got an old chevy, drove -- slept in the car and that kind of thing, and they checked on them. it's an interesting book. no conclusions come from it, just that things are tough for a large number of people. >> yeah. i wrote a little bit about bruce springsteen in here and kind of -- there was a whole school in the early '80s of heartland rock, i guess they called it. so people, musicians finally got interested in blue collar work right when people stopped doing it. [laughter] so, you know, they'd been inspired by all these great two minute songs from california about the pacific association which was -- pacific ocean which was their greatest and post endless feature, so i -- they started writing about unemployment. [laughter] so there was bruce springsteen

writing "my hometown." there was michael stanley from cleveland, he wrote a book called "this town" which was sort of an anthem of local pride. things were tough in cleveland. there was john cougar mellencamp, his songs "jack and diane," "pink houses." and billy joel, he wrote "allentown." and bob seger had a song about the glory days of the auto industry. and then springsteen, actually, he did a song about youngstown on the ghost of tom jones. >> that's the song the book inspired. >> oh, okay. >> and the title's interesting because they were in california, a homeless person was murdered, and the guy wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone. >> oh, my god. >> so the homeless gathered in this park in orange county, and these guys were camped with them. and all of a sudden the police came in to run them off at midnight, and the author said i

can't believe they're doing this. and he said, well, what do you think, this is someplace like america? >> wow. >> it's a good book. >> do you know who the author is? >> no, i don't remember. >> okay. all right, i'll look it up. oh, okay. >> how many rust belt cities did you see that kind of bucked the trend and really didn't have a significant, you know, downfall in. >> well, definitely chicago. i devoted a whole chapter to that. it was from a comment i overheard from people actually working in a bookstore in lansing, and they said we're all going to end up in chicago. [laughter] so it's kind of a rite of passage, you know? you go to high school, you go to college, you spend maybe a year or two off on a low wage job, and then you move to chicago. which is what i did. i followed all my friends to chicago in the mid 1990s. they just were suddenly picking up and moving during that recession. and, i mean, chicago -- there

are a couple reasons. back in the '80s when i, during the period i was reading about, people did think it was going to become a rust belt casualty. and a couple reasons were, one, it had a more diversified economy. the steel mills were only in one small part of chicago. it had publishing, advertising, and finance. it's the financial capital of the midwest, so it was well positioned for when finance replaced industry. and mayor richard j. daley, he had really worked hard to preserve downtown. i mean, he inherited a downtown in which no buildings had been built since the 19 -- since the great depression. and, you know, he left it with the john hancock center and the sears tower, and he also made sure that to hear as transportation switched from -- that o'hare, that chicago was

still the transportation center of the country. and someone in cleveland asked me what did chicago do right, and i think they wanted to know what can cleveland do that chicago did, and my conclusion was cleveland can't do anything. in a lot of ways, chicago's expense -- success comes at the expense of the rest of the region. i mean, it really attracts, you know, it's getting a free ride on the public education systems in michigan and indiana and ohio and here in wisconsin because, you know, so many young people move to chicago. there's at least one bar for every big ten school in chicago, and for my school, michigan state, i think there are over a dozen which i think are more than in east lansing. more than half the graduates now leave the state. so that's definitely the success story. but it's kind of a case where it's kind of a consequence of

globalization. just as money and education becomes concentrated among fewer people, it becomes concentrated among fewer cities too. and so you had -- did someone -- you had a question back there. >> just wondering with the great depression and the rides of the unions because of that -- rise of the unions because of that why during this great recession -- [inaudible] sort of right-wing backlash and why -- [inaudible] >> well, i think one problem is that people associate unions with industrial worker, with blue collar work, and i remember i asked a union, former union organizer or a union local president in chicago why don't more white collar workers demand unions. and he said, well, you know, the white collar worker, he has kind of a bob crash chet attitude. i'm going to make you an

assistant manager, and call me harry. they're kind of lulled into thinking they're actually peers of the people they work for when the blue collar workers never had that attitude. so i think people need to take the attitude that, you know, unions are for all workers, not just for blue collar workers. but, i mean, the union movement in private industry has pretty much been destroyed. it's down to 6 or 7%, and certainly as you've seen here in wisconsin, now they're moving on to the public sector unions. i mean, i think maybe -- i don't know what the exact percentage is in the public sector, but it's higher. and they kind of use the argument, you know, after they destroy the public sector unions, they go to the people who are now doing less well than they would have been if they had a union, look, aren't you envious of them? they want to drag everybody down to that level. and, well, and another reason in the depression there was

certainly more political support. i mean, one reason that the sit-down strike succeeded was because franklin d. roosevelt was in the white house, and frank murphy, who was a roosevelt ally, was governor of michigan. they deliberately were trying to wait until he was inaugurated because he refused to send in the national guard to kick them out of the plants. so, and i don't think there's that kind of political support, at least at the governor level, anywhere in the midwest right now. >> you could argue barack obama? >> well -- >> [inaudible] >> yeah, well, he did have the steel workers in chicago. and i think that's a big reason that he was so sympathetic to bailing out the auto industry. i mean, that was pretty much the first task of his administration, was putting together a task force to rescue the auto industry. and he certainly beat that drum hard during last year's campaign, especially in ohio where they have plenty of auto plants. i mean, mitt romney had written a, an op-ed for the new for "thk

times" titled let detroit go bankrupt, and obama didn't let him forget about that. >> i was curious -- >> yeah. >> -- the, what's, what would you say is the number one lesson that you take away from what appears to be kind of an industrial evolution which has happened in the past and is likely to ap in the future -- to happen in the future as economies evolve? is there a key lesson that you found that you would look and say that as we look at economies 10 and 20 and 30 years moving forward that you look and say it was true here, it's likely to be true there and that people should be aware of? >> well, i would certainly say diversify your city's economy would probably be number one. because you look at flint, and flint had two-thirds of the

labor force in flint was dependent on general motors in one way or another, either directly or through a subsidiary. and after, after they lost that, i mean, the whole town fell apart. no way you can -- there's no way you can replace 70,000 jobs, and even if you can replace them, there's no way you can replace them with the kind of middle class jobs that they had. so i think, i'd say that would be the number one lesson. but, i mean, i think part of this, though, was simply unavoidable. i mean, in the era when things were so good, the economy i guess as they would say, was siloed. we didn't really have to think about the rest of the world. we were the only country that could make anything. and now we live in a global economy. and so workers are competing against workers all over the world. so, but don't be, don't be a

one-industry town. i think that applies to big towns as well as small towns, whether you, you know, have a paper mill or anything like that. don't think one industry's going to come in and save your town. >> [inaudible] in there also that don't think -- >> don't think you're going to have a job for life, i suppose, lesson for workers. don't even think you're going to have benefits for life, because i think a lot of workers as you saw in wisconsin steel thought they were going to have a pension and benefits. it's sad that you have to say that to people, but i think maybe the promise that the baby boomers thought that they grew up with, i don't think people of my generation expect that same promise that they did of, you know, lifetime employment and craild l to grave benefits -- cradle to grave benefits. all right. one more question here. >> okay. so what should happen with towns

like flint and detroit? should they be dissolved? do they deserve to continue as cities? can they? is it feasible? >> well, i think that -- i don't think flint and detroit are functional cities anymore. really. i mean, their both under the control of emergency managers appointed by the governor of michigan. whose job is really to keep cutting their budgets. but they've already been cut to such a level that they can no longer provide basic services. so, i mean, they've lost so many people that there's no way 700,000 lower crass people in detroit -- lower class people can pay for the infrastructure that was built for 1.8 million people in the 1950s. when i was in detroit, the lighting company blew out, and the library and wayne state and all the court buildings could cn were shut down for the day. that's the kind of thing you expect to happen in third world capitals. i mean, i think the answer is

consolidating them with the surrounding suburbs the way they did in indianapolis and toronto and miami. because if a city can't afford democracy, it's not really a city anymore. it's -- they're basically wards of the state, and it's really dragging down not just the city itself, but the entire state of michigan. i mean, when you have the two most violet cities in the nation -- violent cities in the nation and a city that is such an international symbol of urban decay you've got people flying in from france to take pictures of it, that reflects badly on the state from monroe to ironwood. all right. so i guess we've run through our hour, so i'll thank everybody for coming here. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's web site, edwardmcclelland.com. >> we've got more coverage of

nonfiction books and the book industry every weekend on booktv. including today at 6 p.m. eastern. a 1997 book notes interview with the late katherine graham. >> what year did your father buy the post? >> in 1933. he had just gotten out of the government, been out about three weeks. he had started the reconstruction finance cooperation under hoover, and he stayed as federal reserve chairman for a little while under roosevelt, and then he resigned because he didn't like roosevelt's monetary policies and went to -- [inaudible] the post came out three weeks later for auction on the steps of the building, and he bought it anonymously. c-span: what'd he pay for it? >> guest: ing $825,000. c-span: how many newspapers in washington then? >> guest: there were five, and the post was fifth in a field of fife. so it had a circulation of about

50,000 in a pretty broken-down building. and so he started in, and he -- he was a businessman, and he thought he knew how to turn around businesses, but he never really had had any newspaper experience, and he encountered the most horrendous difficulties in fighting his way up. but he really did a terrific job starting with nothing. >> along with our schedule, you can also see our programs anytime at booktv.org and get the latest updates throughout the week. follow us on facebook and twitter. >> here's a look at the bestselling hard cover nonfiction books according to the new york time thes. this list reflects sale as of august 8th. climbing to the top is zealot. the book is a biography of jesus of nazareth and was fourth on the list last week. sheryl sandberg, the chief operating officer of facebook, offers her career advice to women with "lean in: women, work and the will to lead." the book is we second.

next, chief national correspondent mark leibovich in the his book, "this town." he will be on c-span's "q&a" on august 18th. duck dynasty reality tv star phil robertson is fourth with his autobiography happy, happy, happy followed by jeff stibel's "breakpoint," how the internet compares to the human brain. sixth, laura hillen brand recounts the story of an olympic run or's survival as a prisoner of the japanese in world world , in "unbroken." number seven is "let's explore diabetes with owls" from humorist david she dairies. eighth is "dad is fat" followed by singer and actress shirley

jones' self-titled biography. and a behind the scenes look at "the duck dynasty" show. go to nytimes.com and click on arts for more on these bestsellers. ..