ranch and will make it happen. the book is called the vanishing american adult, senator ben sasse, thanks for joining me today c-span, where history unfold daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's people television companies. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> good afternoon. good afternoon.

thank you. this is not my mike and i am not used to it so i couldn't hear if you can hear me. thank you for joining us for our program with author amy goldstein who will discuss her book janesville, an american story. my name is renée and i'm the programming and outreach coordinator here at public library. at this time, i would like to ask that you turn off or silence your electronic devices. also, at the end of today's program ms. goldstein will have time for questions and answers and then be available under the skylight to autograph books. we do still have a few available, i think, if you are interested in purchasing a book and you didn't get a yellow post-it with a number. see, phil, in the back. also with the two in a, i just want to make sure that will all be on our best behavior. ms. goldstein is here to talk

about her book. she is not a politician. you will get to ask questions, like i said, you will raise your hand, i'll bring you the mike, and please don't start talking until i give you the microphone in front of your face. as i said, there are a limited number of books they are $27 and they will be available to purchase after the program. they are $27 and back cash or check made out to book world. if we run out of books and not everyone gets one, this goldstein has played that she will be happy to autograph and you can purchase the book from the world or the bookstore in madison, mystery to me.

according to ms. goldstein bio on the washington post website, she has been a staff writer at the washington post for more than a quarter century. over the years, she has written widely about social policy issues including: medicare and medicaid, welfare, housing and the strains based on the social safety net by the great recession. she's also been a white house correspondent and covered notable news, events ranging from the monica lewinsky scandal to the columbine shootings, to the past for supreme court nominations. goldstein was part of a team of washington. orders awarded the 2002 pulitzer prize for national reporting for the newspaper coverage of 911. the government's response to the attack.

she was also a 2009 pulitzer prize nominee, finalist, for national reporting for an investigative series she cowrote her colleague, tina preece, on the medical treatment of immigrants detained by the federal government. from the amazon summary of her book, janesville: an american story is amy goldstone's intimate account of the closing of the general motors assembly plant in janesville and a larger story of the hollowing of american middle class. ms. goldstein has spent years immersed in janesville including lots of time right here where the nations oldest operating general motors plant shutdowns in the midst of the great recession, two days before christmas 2008. her book takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians and job retainers to show why it's so hard in the 21st

century to re-create a healthy, prosperous working-class. this is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the american heartland when it's factory stills but it's not the familiar tale, most observers record the immediate shock of venus jobs but you stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up. i think janesville is the can-do community. please join me in welcoming giving amy goldstein a warm welcome clima. [applause] >> the first thing i want to say is standing here seems presumptuous to be talking about

your own story. you've been generous enough to share with me. i want to say thank you. suspended the biggest work of my career and thank you for helping me to do it. be here today is pretty emotional and i wanted to make it clear that i wasn't going to start crying in front of the television cameras here today. i arrived here at the complete stranger in 2011 and there are people in this room today welcomed me into your living room, welcomed me into your classrooms, welcome me into your offices, showed me the files in the janesville room at the library here and people who have helped me understand this community. i am so grateful and i can't tell you how crushed and humbled i am by the size of the crowd in this room. it means a lot to me.

i am also interested to hear your questions and to hear your take on what i've learned and what i have written because this is, after all, how i see your story and may not be exactly how you see the story some looking to hear how -- i thought i'd read you a little bit from the first page of the book. it starts on the day that will be familiar to many of you. it's 7:07 in the last tahoe reaches the end of the assembly line. outside, it is still dark, 50 degrees for 33 inches of snow nearly a december record piled up in 15 in the stinging wind across the acreage parking lot. inside the janesville assembly plant, the lights are placing into the crowd is thick. workers are about to walk out of the plant into uncertain futures stand alongside pension retirees

who walked back in their test tight with nostalgia. all these gm followed the tahoe as it takes online and they are cheering, hugging and weeping. the final tahoe is a beauty. it's a black ltc fully loaded with heated seats, aluminum wheels and a bose auto speaker and $57000 sticker price if it would be for sale in this economy, in which almost no one wants to buy a fancy general motors suv. five men, including one in a santa hat, stand in front of the signy black suv holding a wide banner. it's crammed with worker signatures and the last vehicle off the janesville assembly line the banners is the date, december 203rd 2008. it is destined for the council historical society. television crews as far away as

the netherlands and japan has come to fill this moment when the oldest plant in the nation's largest auto motor turns out it's last card. the assembly plant two days before closing is recorded. this is the story of what happens next. so, i thought you might be interested in hearing what a journalist and works and lives in washington dc would suddenly show up in janesville, wisconsin and keep coming back for years. there are a couple of reasons. in a big picture way in my career i've been drawn for a long time to stories that lie at the intersection of politics and public policy and help explain how ordinary people are affected by both. the story of what's happening at the janesville assembly plant closed is that tradition. i got a little carried away this time at mac more specific reason

is that when the great recession arrived near the end of 2007, i was covering a very broader social policy beat for the washington post and as i mentioned, i had just cowrote a series of foreigners the government and locked away in immigration detention facilities and what better medical care they were getting. what's interesting now that's what i became interested in how this bad economic times was changing people's lives. i started to write a few stories for the washington post about this and i'm just can read you a couple paragraphs from one that i wrote out of southwest florida about people who were signing up for welfare for the first time. here in florida is also the new face of welfare includes people tumbled from the middle class and higher after losing jobs, savings and self-reliance. in returning to welfare years after they thought they had found permanent work and

independence. in the county that includes fort myers, nearly 40% of the 800 people applied for welfare in october and never before asked for help. i got to do what i got to do to get by, tony robin at 33 and five months pregnant said as she sat in front of a black computer terminal in room 110 a fort myers regional service center typing in an application for cash assistance. she and her husband jason open tiptop tile in cape coral, florida in 1986. most years they earned about $50000. the business failed three years ago in southwestern florida from the building boom collapsed. i will that story in decembe december 2008 which turned out to the same month that your assembly plant closed but i didn't know it at the time. if you remember, back then, all these job losses were not happening just in janesville. there were so many kinds of jobs going away, all over the country, that i got pretty

focused on this and over the next couple of years i really can't deny on how other journalists were writing about this bad economic times. there were two main kinds of writing that was going on back then. there were stories there were about the economy and the government's response to the bad economic times and whether the economic stimulus package that then the new president barack obama had to congress and was doing any good or not. these were economic and political stories about the fighting that was going on in congress over that administration policy. then there were more political stories in the midterm elections for congress in 2010. i saw the writers focused on the anxiety of voters about voter anger and voter apathy and i started to think, i didn't really see anyone putting those two things together. i had this idea that you couldn't really understand why americans were angry or were

anxious unless you really understood their personal economic experiences or their fear that their neighbor had lost her job and they would be next. found a study that a foundation did in 2009 delicate 10000 new stories about the great recession, the first half of 2009 and i found that most of those stories were about the government bailout and banks in the auto industry and of those 2010-2010 stories how many were about average americans? 5%. this struck me as a really, huge, important gap. it seemed that we all knew the unemployment to 26 we didn't know what it is like to have work go away. i can only say that i became obsessed with this idea about trying to do something about this because i had this impression that something

fundamental was changing in this country about people's faith in their work that they had always expected to be around. i became assessed with the idea of finding one community that had lost a lot of its best work to do a close-up of what really happened to people, workers, families to the community itself when all this work finished. i had the idea that if i could focus on one community it could be a microcosm or metaphor that could help people by looking at what happened in one place to think about what happened all around them. now, i became so obsessed that i never done something in my career which is i took a leave for my job to write the longest piece i've ever done in my life. if you think about to write about a microcosm you better choose well. how did i end up in janesville when there's all these other communities that were losing

work to? i didn't know this community and i didn't have family here and i've never been here or have friends here but i had heard about janesville which i never heard about before in 2009 when i was looking for a setting for one of the stories i did about recession effects for the washington post. somebody mentioned there was a community in wisconsin that lost a big general motors plant. i thought that was interesting because this is just happened and a lot of people had worked for general motors itself still getting sub pay. the economic pain hadn't began to steep and so i didn't, but janesville lingered in my mind. as i was getting close to getting started after i did the scary thing of taking time off from my job and i tried various places that i could go, something inside me kept telling

me to go to janesville. why was that? one of the reasons was that i needed to find a place that had lost a lot of jobs and you definitely qualified. i don't have to tell you that thousands of jobs and there were different figures that you can see but looking at the bureau of labor statistics in 2008 and 2009 about 9000 jobs left this county. a lot of jobs and if you look at what happened to the unappointed rate here at this time in june of 2008 when they announced general motors would shut down production the unappointed rate was 5.4% and in march of 2009 a few months after the jobs disappeared unemployment had shot up to over 13%. on the job loss runs you are a winner. or loser. [laughter] beyond that i had the sense that i wanted to tell the story what this recession had done.

it was important to me that had not been part of the. [inaudible] i didn't want to find myself writing about an accumulation of economic decay and i wanted to show what one bad economic time did. first, michigan was an old story and i wanted to find a place where economic travel was new and the general motors assembly plant had been treating a little bit and more and more over the last couple decades but it always got a new product so, this closing was a very different thing that nobody in town had experienced. that was very appealing to me, not that i was happy for you but it was appealing to me as a place to do this writing into this talking to people about what is happening in their community. i had the sense that no place is the exact as everyplace but i thought it be interesting to

find community to write about where the pattern of job losses matched pretty well the national pattern of jobs that one way in this great recession. if you think about what happened nationally, the largest desert jobs disappeared when the manufacturing disappeared. a lot of the jobs that were lost that had paid really well but didn't require had to educate high levels of education. more men than women lost jobs in this recession and that was true of janesville. i thought this was a community that had a number of the qualities in the lost jobs that other people would understand and identify with. i also had the sense that things might fit nicely into the sweep of history. remember the first time when i found a youtube video for a speech that then senator, barack

obama gave at the assembly plant in february of 2008. i don't know if you remember him coming and i remember the first time i listened to the video saying the promise of janesville is the promise of america. that line gave me goosebumps because i heard that youtube video couple years after the assembly plant closed and there was an irony, by then, throughout this presidential candidate and what he was saying. janesville had been a part of the sitdown strike of the 1930s and the assembly plant had been part of the war effort in world war ii when they started making artillery shells set of vehicles and the parker pen who had been from here and in his own moment of 20th century history. of course, before i knew anything about this committee or met anybody i had the sense that i might find an interest in politics. i thought there might be something interesting about an

old uaw town that was represented by scott walker in the state governed representative by paul ryan in a state that was led by scott walker. as a journalist, i try to bring all of my reporting instincts to bear to think about what might be a good setting and i decided that i was going to make an exploratory visit to janesville. i first came here in july of 2011. i had arranged to meet the people, couple people in the room, there were part of that first visit that i met a couple days was here in the very first person i met and found that i had set up a meeting with him was stan who was, obviously, and all time is a reporter who, by then, had left the newspaper and was on a different radio show that the one is on now and was working in education consultant and had an office in the world

headquarters and now been renovated obviously, into offices. stan and i talked and talked for a couple of hours we talked about the history of the community and what it was like when he was growing up as a boy here in the assembly plant and we talked for two-three hours nonstop. finally, he said to me would you like to see the plans? i said, of course, i would. so i got into the car with a man i had never known and we drove down central avenue and we turn left on delavan and there was the plans. it was obviously huge and i had never seen it before 4.8 million square feet on the plans as we were approaching stand for something i did that surprising. he said i hate to go by this and i said why? it surprising.

stan, if you know him, he's a pretty tough character, veteran reporter and he calls himself a senate and i tend to agree. [laughter] is not struck me as he'd be hesitant to see something in town. he told me his father had worked as a plant and he remembered being so proud of his father and how his wages and let him by his first chevy. when a man i had just met that day said that to me i said there's something here in this community about the relationship between this) and people's sense of work and what people sense should be like and wasn't anymore. i kept coming back. now, i have met and spoken with many people and time, many more people to turn it into a book. that is where my gratitude comes in.

i have learned from all of you who i have met in the last six years. what i have tried to do is get to know people in town. i don't know all of you but i tried to get to know people in town who had various vantage points in this community. people who were at the assembly plants and people who were at the suppliers and people who were teachers who try to figure out how to help kids whose families were hurting, people who did economic development work, i wanted to understand how this thing looked from lots of people's perspective. i was really slow to figure out who were going to be the main people in my book because i felt that i couldn't pick -- it's funny to talk about characters and some of you are in the room. you are real people but are also book characters, at this point. i felt that i couldn't pick would be the main characters in the story i wanted to tell until i understood what were the choices that different people

made them over the range of choices so i can figure out who would be good examples of each of those places. i arrived in 2011 which was obviously two and a half years after the assembly plant had shut down and i knew from the beginning that i would need to go back in time so that i could tell the story from the moment that the announcement happened that the town would be changed. i knew i would have to find people to talk to who could go back a couple years with me and explain what life had been like if i showed up on the scene. i also had the sense that i needed to understand the history of this community. so, as rené said, i spent time reading and spent time with the historical society because i wanted to understand what the industrial past of janesville had been. i wanted to understand the pride and the work that was done here

and where it came from. i wanted to understand the identity and exultation of janesville were so i could understand what it felt like when things were changing. i did a lot of historical work. now, one of the things that struck me when i started showing up and talking to more and more people was that when this plant closed there was a lot of disbelief and denial that it was real. you know, i showed up to a half years after and i kept running into people who said, just wait, it's just a matter of time before it comes back. does that sound familiar to you? i thought, why, was that it? that was because this had made tractors in 1919 and made chevrolets on valentine's day of 1923 and every time a product away from the splint, another eventually showed up. so, there was no expectation, no experience with it not happening again.

so, what i began to see was that people made choices about what to do next or as i sometimes came to think about it, what choices do people make when the best working-class choices of jobs were gone. people began to make choices and in a lot of cases i found the tech people to settle into what they were going to do. when i finally chose people would be the heart of the story, i look for people who and made different choices. it could've been many people from the community and i had to pick some people. i want to tell you about some of the people who i chose in this book and some are in the room, which is really great to see you. so, one of the families are the bonds. they are in all the family in town, as you might know. there was a couple families in town with three generations of people on the executive committee of uaw 95 and i was

really interested in what the role of the union had been here and what happened the union when all these jobs went way. so, i got to know mike vaughn and his wife barb and both mike and barb had worked at lear. mike had been the shop chairman at your. bob lost her job a little before dave did and she went back to. [inaudible] she did very well and mike tried to find a union job it wasn't so easy to find. he went into human resources management and actually did great at school and got made a good go of it but he had to really decide that going into management was an okay transition to make. he explained it to me many times that he felt he could help people from the union side and help human resources for the management side. that's a very thoughtful kind of transition that somebody made here in town.

another family was the wildcats. some of you might know marv was the employer system representative for quarter of a century at the plant. his son matt was at the plant. matt had worked at general motors for 13 years and his dad had retired just a few weeks before matt had his layoff. i talked to them about what it was like for marv to have this big retirement party knowing that he had two kids about to lose his work. matt also went back to school and he is doing very well and thought he'd try to going to utility work and he was studying power distribution and just before he was to finish up he began to think hard about whether job would be at the other end like a lot of people the all the people that i've written about but finances

weren't so good. as you all know, people who worked at general motors had an advantage that suppliers didn't have which was transfer rights. matt became one of the so-called. [inaudible] he took an offer at fort wayne and he's been commuting there for seven years and has eight years to go until he is eligible for retirement and to this day he leaves every monday morning, comes home on friday nights, works second shift so he more or less wakes up in janesville three mornings out of the week. then i wrote about the whitakers. now, jared whitaker got work in tammy whitaker his here in the front row got work and they started working one or two jobs. jerry didn't want to leave his family. his family didn't want to leave like janesville like a lot of

people. a lot of volatility in the area and didn't want to move to another part of the country. jared and tammy finally decided that the best thing to do was take a buyout. it wasn't a great buyout, few thousand dollars but it came with six months of health insurance. that was important when jared is working a job that didn't come with health insurance at the time. now, i have to say, i fell in love with her daughters. i met their daughters, who were twins, melissa and kate, when they were high school seniors. these girls are smart kids, hard-working kids, honest students, taking ap classes in between them they were working five part-time jobs. other kids in town who did the same thing the whitaker girls were the ones i got to know the best. they had a sense of responsibility that they could see their parents were

struggling, as hard as their parents working it didn't bring enough money so the girls began helping with grocery shopping and utility bills. whitaker girls are both doing great. they went to parkville and one graduated already she graduated three years to save on tuition money and she's becoming a social worker and studying on her master now. alyssa will be an engineer. they are doing great. i was really struck and what it does to a family all of which is trying to do as hard as i can to make a go of it and it changes life. those are the close-ups that i've taken the story of families and a few workers who wander off the stage but there are the main families. i wanted this not to be a story about just the workers but what happens to the community and what to other people in town do when they see that there is more need coming along that have been

happening in this community before. so, another person i wrote about was dairy eastman. she is the founder of the -- a lot of schools have closets which are places where kids who need a little bit of help can quietly, privately, without a lot of attention on them come to get used jeans or prom dresses that people donate to get close, food, toiletries, school supplies, she created this at the parker high school. i thought that was a really interesting example of resourcefulness within the school. i also write about mary rumor and her last name was changed to. diane hendrix from beloit cofounded 5.0 and i was interested in the local economic development effort has been like. rock county 5.0 was supposed to be going for five years and it's

still going and they been trying very hard to bring businesses to town. i tried to get inside their perspective on what they thought they should be doing to help the community. bob boardman was here today is part of the story. bob was in the job center which was ground zero for where people went when they lost their work. bob taught me a lot about what kind of options were available, what kind of funding there was for retraining people tried to help people find jobs so, bob's perspective was a valuable one and in scene who comes in when people don't have work anymore and what their options are and what their options aren't and how hard it is to get back on your feet even when you're trying as hard as you can. i also write about a woman named and is a social worker in the janesville school system.

she works lives in beloit but she's the cofounder of something called project 1649 that some of you probably know which has been an effort that has gone on for years to try to raise money to house homeless kids because there are more homeless teens in the school system. i was moved by and telling me how when she and the counterpart in beloit school system got going, just talking to people about the fact that they were homeless teenagers in janesville district people didn't believe it. that's not janesville image. this is not a place where people have homelessness. she has really exposed and done a lot of good work to try to help people understand what kinds of needs some kids have. and there are politicians in the butt. tim: just arrived, nice to see you, tim. tim was the head of the cochair

of the task force that then, governor doyle appointed try to rescue the plan. i was interested in what that effort was and what it takes for estate, community, county to pull resources together in a bad economic times to try to persuade general motors that this was the plans that janesville was the place the general motors should choose what was going to start manufacturing the first compact car that gm had made domestically in a long time. i think it's fair to say that everybody from the governor on down thought that janesville had a good time to get this car and it didn't work out. tim taught me a lot about what that effort was like and about other things that have been changing in town. i got to know people at the sharon kennedy came back today. sharon no longer lives in janesville so i'm honored that she's back to hear me talk about

the story she helped teach me. it was what the college was doing and how well it was going. those are some of the people in the story and they are people who some of you know, they are people who most readers in my but do not know but i wanted to have these close up showing what it was like for individuals to do the best they can to try to bring back the economy of a town that had lost the heart of its work. now, in addition to these close-ups, i wanted to find a way to show the individual stories i am telling were part of a broader truth in this part of wisconsin. kind of a dirty journalist, as a journalist go and i did a couple of statistical things with help from academics. i did two studies. one was a study of job retraining, looking at people who were getting unemployment benefits in this area and 2008, 2009 and 2010.

what happened to people who would come back to school and what happened to people who didn't. so, we got data from the state workforce development board and got data from the college, did a lot of statistical analysis with a couple labor economist who did things i didn't know what to do and found really interesting and sobering patterns. it turned out that if you look at how many people working and what their pay was back in 2007 before the recession and then he looked at how things were in 2011 which was that you got this data, people who had gone back to school for not doing as well. it's not to say that nobody was doing as well, mike is in the room and he did great. and his wife did great, bob, nice to see you both. so that no one did well but on

balance people didn't get good jobs and good pages because they went back to school and that caused me to think a lot. there's some ruminations in a story about why that was, what that says about what kinds of jobs you need in the community to have retraining and turns out to be beneficial to broad numbers of people. i became convinced that black hawk is doing a great job. in a couple thousand factory workers come back. huge numbers of people went back to school and if you think about it, imagine you worked in a factory for a long time, you are in your 30s or 40s and you haven't been to school in a long time and you might not of been a great student to start with and you don't have any money anymore, you don't know what's coming next and you have to start studying? that's a scary thing for a lot of people to do. black hawk, i came to think, had really tried and very ingenious ways to help the students

starting computer camps when it became people didn't know how to use computers very well and starting study skills programs but despite all that effort, not everybody went back to school benefited from it. at least, not right away. the other thing i did was a survey center of our county and it was a mail survey and i don't know if you got the questionnaires but we sought out questionnaires for 2000 people in more than half of the people who got the surveys mail them back whisper survey work is great. what that survey was looking at was what were people's economic experiences and attitudes -- this was in 2013 so as five years, four and a half, five years depending on when you were on second shift for the last shift that closed down after all this work had vanished. one of the questions that really blew me away with simply asking people, do you think the

recession is over? five years later, three-quarter said that they did not think the recession was over. we asked about people's personal financial situations and this is not the people who lost work but this is people in rock county. was there financial system better or worse than the recession began? over half said it was worse, 18% said their financial situation had gotten better in those years. now, i was interested in how many households were affected directly by loss of jobs and it turns out that 35% of the people who answered the survey said that they or someone in their homes had lost her job. if you think about how many families were touched by all this job loss, it's huge. then i asked a series of questions and developed this

sociologist -- just for people who lost a job or someone in their home and the question was have you noticed any of this happening to you. a whole bunch of choices. 75% of the people who lost the job said they were losing sleep. we asked if they were having strange family relations. 62% said yes. do you find yourself avoiding social situations postmark almost half said yes. the question that i found most heartbreaking was do you find yourself embarrassed or ashamed about being out of work? just over half said yes. what that said to me, that combined with all the interviewing i headed with people who were nice enough to come here today, and many other

people i got to know in town, was that even when you lose a job when thousands of people are losing jobs and your neighbors are losing jobs with big obvious employer goes away, lucy work is personal. it's a hard thing, figuring out to do is a hard thing and you wonder if i had just been good enough, i wouldn't have lost my job. even though people on the outside can say this is a bad economic time and it was a corporate decision, lucy work is a personal thing. i thought i would end by reading a little more that's okay. this is a chapter toward the end of the story called night drive and it's about matt who is, as i said, commuting to fort wayne, indiana. it's about his ride home. come on, get the hell out of

here, a guy shouts as he burst out the door and speed walks across the terra-cotta lobby. barely slowing to show his id card to the punch card. friday night at the fort wayne assembly plant, the end of the workweek, the end the second shift, and nine hours if today was the lucky hours overtime. there's 11:45 p.m. and this guy is shouting one guy among 1100d amherst pouring off the factory floor to start the weekend. amid this board, matt reaches the lobby at 11:47 p.m. wearing a knit cap, backpack slung over one shoulder and she is not running but he too is walking very, very fast. friday night ritual. he reaches the chilly night air and a coworker wishes him a safe drive tonight. he stops for an instance of the 97 saturn which he parks in the same part of the vast lot every friday in the middle row under a streetlamp so that he won't have

to think about where he's left his car when he returns on monday. he pulls his duffel from the truck and continues walking very, very fast over to a nearby 2003 pontiac grand prix already idling. the driver seat is chris aldrich, in the backseat's coach scrunched up to him in the door is paul sheridan, janesville. he tosses his double inside and slammed the trunk shot before he gets in on the passenger side. the door is very close to when they got and it is conned and he was off. 280 miles to go. four hours and 35 minutes speeding just a little weather pretty sure they're not get caught.