of course, telegraph the punch line. thank you very much. i think we're around the end of the hour but i'm not positive. [applause] >> i'll be signing books out there for i hope many of you would like to buy it. thanks again. >> from the prize-winning reporter amy goldsteen is next. she talks be the closing of a gm assembly plant in jamesville, wisconsin, during the great recession.

>> good evening, everyone. my name is carmelo of villa, the director of the work project of the wisconsin humanities council. thank you all for coming tonight to see amy goldstein's book presentation, "janesville: an american story." thank thursday amy for come he to tower about the live of the hard working people of janesville, beautifully documented in your wonderful book. the book festival comes to life every year thanks to the hard work and dedication of our friends at the madison public library, the event could not be possible without the sponsorship

of our friend sod i encourage you to go to the festival web site and fine out more about our sponsors tonight. the wisconsin humanities council is proud to sponsor amy's talk this evening. it's a wonderful opportunity for us to continue to do what organizations has done statewide for 25 years, which is to support and promote programs that use history, culture and discussion to strengthen community life in wisconsin for everyone. tonight's presentation would not only delight you but help you move forward in this direction. for to might not know the wisconsin humanities council -- the wisconsin book festival was credited by wisconsin humanities council organization, coordinatedded the event for over 13 years, before friend ted madison public library decided to take on the herculean event.

so cued doze for them making this event great, great and greater every year. so, amy goldstein is presented by working life project which asks wisconsinites what does work mean in your life. our project seeks to enrich statewide publicities discussion about the past, present and future of work in wisconsin, to public events, radio programs and online resources, or projects promote what works, what means to all of us meaned individually and all of us together as a group. to fine out more about our working life project and other wisconsin humanity council programs, you can check us out at wisconsin humanities.org. so, i like to introduce amy with basic idea that is somewhat

profound and it's that to many of news the room today, work is part of what the finals individual and what connects us a members of society. this is why we felt so inspired by amy's book. janesville, an american story, tells the story of working people and their families in ways that promote empathy, admiration and dignity. it's profound and inspiring, the book brings to life the story of how auto worker and the families and the community of janesville team came to turn with the gm plant shut down. dominate conversations about what the future of our economy and the nature of work life. amy's book remind us that there's more to our economic upturns and downturns than. be

understood. in midst of it's there are a lives, real people with real hopes and as operations, seeking to make a life and live in dignity. amy's impressive credentials include 30 years tenure as a staff write are for the "washington post," where much of her work has focused on social policy. herred her accolades including a pulitzer prize a fellow at the herbert humidities foundation for journalist and the radcliffe institute for advanced knowledge. this is her first book. i like to invite everyone to silence your phones and put it in -- you know, silent mode. also, if you feel that this is a really compelling conversation, you're more than welcome to share your thoughts through the media outlets at the wisconsin book festival has set by using

the #we book fest, when posting information and uploading photos. we'll be very, very grateful if you do this after the presentation so we can hear amy. so now without further adieu, highs amy goldstein. [applause] >> thank you for that very nice introduction and those flattering words about my book. thank you to the wisconsin book festival for the invitation to be here, and thanks for a large number of you for coming out on a damp night tonight. for me it's actually great to be back in janesville. one of the side effects of having spent several years getting to know janesville, wisconsin,ings that madison is something of a second home to me. so, i feel like i'm on semi home surf talking with now and it like that. i have a question. how many of you here have some connection to janesville, either ever lived there or know people who are there?

okay. i thought this was a safe question to ask because i have not spoken anywhere where there hasn't been at least one person in the audience from janesville, and that includes l.a., san francisco, boulder, colorado, a lot of people who came to one motor vehicle first readings in d.c. so i have a sense that this story, which is about one community and about the mean offering the loves work and loss of community, very specifically affects kind of a janesville diaspora i have learned exists once the book came out. i thought that i would start by telling you a little bit about my first exposure to janesville, wisconsin. i first stepped into town on july 26, 2011 and was on an exploratory mission and had lined off few people to meet. the first guy was somebody named stan milam. an oldtime journalist in town.

the state house bureau claim nor janesville gazette for years and he had left the newspaper and was working aned a education consultant and had a radio station and had an office in what had been the parker pen world headquarters, which has been rennovated into office building with many offices empty. that morning stan and i talked nonstop for probably about three hours, he was from janesville, early '60s at the time and we talk about his community and what happened to its economy weapon just talked and talked, and finally, stan said to me something i've been hoping he would ask which is, do you want to see the plant? so i got into this car and we drove down center way turned left on sullivan drive and there was what i see in the pictures, 4.8 million square feet of nothing going on. and the thing that surprised me more than the potency of saying

this closed, huge, old auto plant, was what stan said so me as we were approaching it. he said i hate to see this. well, knew that stan was a pretty tough old reporter. he told me that he was a cynic and over the year is came to believe him. and i said to him, why would somebody like you not want to see this? he told me that his father had worked at the auto plant, and he remembered as a boy how proud has dad had been when he earned enough money to buy his first. i thought u.s. if this tough old journalil cringe ted site of the ought to plant that told me something very powerful 0 on the community sense of identification with the work that had gone i. for a journalist like me that gets one juices flowing and i kept coming back for year. what was doing and janesville that day?

on this exploratory mission? well, for a couple years at that point i'd been thinking about writing a long closeup of what really happened when good work goes away. at the time i was covering a broad social policy beat for the "washington post," and it's a great recession began at the end of 2007 and kept going until it officially ended in 2009, a little bit after that, did a few stories as part of my beat for the "post" on things i later learned were call recession effects. what was the ground level view of what difference it made that the u.s. economy was in the worst shape it had been in since the great depression of the 1930s. so i did a story for the post poet out of southwest florida on people who were falling out of the middle class and on to welfare rolls and just meeting people in the welfare office and seeing how traumatized and shellshocked they were by finding themselves there. i did a story out of south carolina which at the time the

nation's second highest unemployment rate, about the strains on the private sector parts of the social safety net, places like nonprofit food pantries that were just slammed with more clients than they had ever had and had real diminution in charity. people didn't have enough money to donate so strains as a tangible level. from having done this little bit of work on recession effects-it made the start to pay attention to what other journalists were and weren't writing about the bad economic time. what i noticed was there were really two strains of stories that dominated. there were lots of stories about the government's economic policies and whether the stimulus package of the then pretty new obama administration was working or not working and the political fighting about that. a lot of coverage about those policies. and then as a little time went on i was struck that in the 2010 election -- this may sound

quaint given the stanford last year's election -- there was still already a lot of writing about voter disaffection and anger and what struck -- began to strike me was didn't see much writing that was fusing those two strains. i had the sense that you couldn't really understand why some people in the united states were feeling disaffected and scared and turned off from what was going on in their government unless you really understood their personal economic experiences and fears. jobs that they were losing, jobs they're neighbors were losing, their anxiety their job us might be the next ones to go. around this time i came across a few foundation studies that really caught my attention. it was a content analysis of stories about the bad economy in the first half of 2009. so, the last part of the official period of the great

recession. and what it showed was that most of the stories were about the stimulus package, the auto industry bailout, the banking industry and whether the country should -- the government should have been putting money into rescuing troubled financial institutions, and there was a little bar way to the right of that chart that showed the percentage of stories that were about the effects of the bad economy on ordinary people. and that little bar was five percent of the total. and that kind of absence i thought was a very important gap that we all knew the unemployment statistics but we didn't really understand what it was like to have work go away. so i became, i can only describes as obsessed with finding a way to tell this story and i was sufficiently obsessed by it that i did something i have never been done in my long career which i took a good chunk of time off from the job to find a community which i could tell the story and get to know people

in that place. so, how was it that i came to find janesville? if you're going write a story as a microcosm or a metaphor for what is going to happen, what is happening broadly in country, you better choose carefully. so i thought a lot about what kinds of criteria i should use to pick a place, and i had heard about janesville a few years before when i was looking for settings for some of the stories i was doing about the bad economy, for the "post," and somebody had mention met mow a small city in wisconsin never heard of had just had a very old general motors plant that closed. and i never went there at the time because the plant closing was pretty fresh, and the people who had worked at general motors itself, not other people in town, who lost their jobs took it but the gmers themselves were still getting what was called union subpay, supplemental unemployment benefits whichs buffering the economic pain for a lot of people in town if never

showed up at that time. when i began to think seriously about trying to find a place that could my microcosm, janesville lingered in the brain. one reason was needed to fine a place that lost a lot of jobs and janesville and the area filled the built. 2008 and 2009, 9,000 jobs disappeared from janesville, the county seat in lock county. a lot of jobs for a small place in southeastern wisconsin. but beyond that, wanted to be able to write about some place that had never been been part of the rust belt, because i wanted to be able to look at what this bad economic time in our country's history had done and not an accumulation of economic decay over a period of decades and janesville had gotten its general motors plant in 1918. started making tractors in 1919. just after world war i. and it started turning out

chevys in 1923. and over the intervening decades, products had come and had gone, but every time a product left that factory, general motors sent in something else to replace it. so this had not been a rust belt community, and it really made what happened in 2008 -- two days before christmas of 2008 that the good morning plant closed down, something that was just unprecedented and in this town, and very hard for people to get their head around, that this time was going to be different. and i knew that no place i was going to pick would be exactly like everybody the country but as much as possible it seemed to me a good idea to pick a community in which the pattern of job losses matched the broad pattern of job losses in the great recession. so, nationally, and in janesville, a lot of the jobs that disappeared were oned that paid well and didn't require much formal education.

that was certainly true of these auto worker jobs. and in this recession broadly and in jamesville, more men tom women lost jobs. there's a sense that the kind of job loss that happened in this small wisconsin city was typical of the country. that appealed to me. i also had a sense when i started to research the place that janesville fit nice lie interest the sweep of u.s. history. on that first reporting trip where i met stan milam, somebody else told me that i should find a youtube video of a speech that then-senator barack obama had given in the janesville assembly plant in february of 2008, when he was campaigning to try to win the wisconsin primary. and this was a very big, important economic speech in his campaign in which he out his assed, -- his agenda and he said two things in that speech.

and i it just gave me got a bumps he said, first of all, basically, if the country elected him in followed his economic prescription, that this plant will be here for another 100 years. the other thing he said was, the promise of janesville is a promise of america. and i thought, if i'm going to write about this i want to have that sentence in whatever i write. so that appealed to me. now, janesville has interesting politics -- a lot of other moment inside u.s. history in which janesville figured directly. the late 1930s there was a very important moment in u.s. labor history called the general motors sitdown strike, and janesville is one of the sites of the strike. during world war ii, it was part of the home front when it stopped making vehicles and started making 16 mill meet millimeter artillery shells.

it felt like it was a microcosm of what was happening broadly in the country and u.s. do you recall. understand the politics were interesting. an old democratic leaning union town represented by somebody who had been elected to congress when he was 28 years old and very consecutive, named paul ryan. and at the time that i first shopped up in janesville, paul ryan was not even a committee chairman, let alone a candidate for the vice-presidency of this country, let alone speaker of the house. but i just had the sense to there might be some interesting political tension to be found about this democratic union town with this man as its congressman and the state that if you think about when i showed up, was newly in the hands of scott walker. now, on top of all that, i have to admit thought that janesville was a cool ash american sounding name.

so, that seemed sort of appealing, going to be living with a name i liked the fact it was janesville. so, those are some reasons why that summer of 2011 i made this exploratory trip and met with this oldtime journalist who took me to see the site of a plant that had closed, that was the most interesting thing that happened in town recently, and he didn't want to see it. so, how did i tell this story? well, the idea i had from the outset was that it wanted this book to feel like a kaleidoscope. i wanted to have people from different vantage points in the community whose perspective and attitude and behaviors i could trace over a period of years. showing how job loss affected, yes, some of the family -- i'll talk about the main families in a moment -- also other people in the community and how they thought they ought to respond.

so i was interested in a social studies teacher i met who was -- tell you the two high schools in town are named for parker pen, so parker high school, and the other high school is named craig high school, and craig was the man who persuaded general motors to come to janesville. so these iconic industrialists from the community, their identities are woven into the name of the high schools. parker high school, there's a social studies teacher who formed the parker closet. the noticed more and more kid from. what used to be middle class families were coming to south school not having had breakfast, looking scruffier and when she started on her own and then heap from other people in the community, creating a food pantry and place for kids to get used jeans and school supplies and toilet tries and in the spring she and a lot of poo people now in town collect prom

dresses so that girls can go to the prom who otherwise couldn't afford it. so i strays her store. there was the bog bob bowman who ran the -- he was seeing a lot and i was interested in what he did and the decision head made and how he saw thing toes. i was interested in the main banker in town who cofounded a reaming until a economic development coalition, and so i followed the work that this group did. i was interested in a school social worker whose job at the time was to be the liaison between the school system and the homeless students to try to keep those kids in school. and she ended up forming a relationship with the -- her counterpart in the next town to

south, delt to try raise money homes for homeless teenager ands way was interested in politicians. paul ryan, runs through the story, tim collins, state senator. at the time runs through the story. so there are all these different people who were taking actions that they thought were useful in a town that had just lost the heart of its work and didn't all agree but these were all the strains that were coming together in this community to trying to figure out that would do when he heart of the work went away. but of course the core of my story is about the dislocated workers themselves dislocated is a government term that means you lost your job and there's not much likelihood it's going to come back. that's what the country called these people, dislocated workerred itch decided what i wanted to illustrate was as i

came to think of it, what choices people make when there are no good choices left. and i did not pick characters. it's fun to call these people characters because i just saw most of them thursday night in janesville. people live thing irlives not very far from here and also characters in a book. i had this kind of dual identity at the moment. the page and in their lives. did not pick people quickly because i felt i needed to get to know well enough what was happening in this community and what was the range of things people were doing before i could figure out which families might be good illustrations of these bad choices that people were selecting because they might by better than other bad choices. the first family called the vaughns and they were big union family in town. they were one of two families in janesville that had three generations of men on the united auto workers local 9 a 5

executive committee, and dave vaughn walked another general motors and retired, and he was one of the people i met on this very first trip i made to janesville, the summer of 2011. and i met him because at the time in his retirement, he and another gm retiree were run thing uaw local because there were no active auto workers to running the local. so they were running it in their retirement. and he had had a full career. he was getting his pension, and when i said to him, as i said to many people for the first period of time that i was coming back and forth to janesville, who else should i get to know? dave said, you should get to know my son but probably won't want to talk to you. his son, who is one of the characters in the book, is mike vaughn, mike was the shop chairman at a place called here seating the largest supplier factory to the general motors plant. it had 800 workers itself. and it was making seats and

other auto parts in what is called just in time production. so these seats were become delivered to the assembly plant three hours before they were bolted into gm vehicles. suvs the plant was making third end. so, if you got that kind of lockstock production you can imagine what happened the day that general motors first laid off one shift and then other a few monthed later closed. lear closed as well. and mike's wife, barb, worked at lear and she had lost her job the summer of 2008. mike was allowed to stay a little longer because after the plant shut down there was a skeletal crew that was kept on for a few months, taking apart the assembly plant. mike went to work every day and his work consists of watching the place he had worked at for many years, getting emptiyer and emptier and during this time he was thinking about what was he going to do for work in f tried to apply for union johns in

three-straight rye john and couldn't find anything he thought was good work for million. so his wife was back in school and he began thinking about retraining, and he decided after a lot of thought about what his union skills might have prepared him for, that perhaps he should go into a new program that black hawk technical college in town was start in human resource management. and he really did a lot of thinking about the ethics of this and whether he could switch from labor side to management and he made peace with it, thinking if he could help people from the union side he would probably help people from the management side. similar work but a different perch there only comes a moment when he has to tell his father. i'm going to let you read the book to find out how that guess. second family is a wopac family. like a lot of people in town and all the families in this story. they're multigenerational

family. marv wopat worked at the plant for 40 years, and a few months, and retired the summer of 2008. he was a big guy in town in the plant, on the county board of supervisors, just elected hi first elected position of the board of supervisors. he also was the person on one shift at the plant who was the employee assistance director. he knew everybody's secrets and was the person you turned to if you were having trouble and thought you needed somebody to lean on. so marv retires just a matter of weeks before his son, matt, loses his job. so marv has his retirement party, hundreds of people show up for that because he know as lot of people in town, feeling just guilty as sin that his son is about to lose his job. and matt also tries to figure out what to do next, and like a lot of people in town, matt was list 'king to his father or

people who were -- listening to his father or what people were saying to him, don't worry, the shutdown is temporary. product is going to come back. so there was a huge amount of denial that went on for a lot of years in the community of janesville about whether this closing was permanent. so matt for a while was helping a buddy who was a roofer but weren't many roofs being put on and the place with a lousy economy, and he was collecting his union unemployment pay and hoping things would get better, and he, too, finally went back to school. he studied to become a utility lineman because the word was, both the word on the street and the word amongst the college instructors and counselors who were trying to guide people, that there were a lot of older workers at the utility who were read request to require so the field paid well and jobs would open up. so matt begins studying. in this late 4030s.

hasn't been in school for a couple of decaded at this point. a little women rahresed to be doing his homework with his three daughters on the kitchen table after dinner but doing okay. and by wintertime, he and his wife, who is doing minimum wage work, began to get nervous that they were about to lose their house and the reason they began getting nervous, they had been getting general motors health benefits for a while after the plant closed, and those benefits were running out. so starting to pay for health insurance was going to become really expensive and didn't have the money for and that their mortgage. so, matt and a one of his gmer buddies in the same curriculum program at black hawk tech go to their instructor and say, look, if we hang out until the spring and we get our certificates in this program, are there going to be jobs for us at the end? and they ask this because at this time matt had a choice to make. all along people who had worked at gm who were pretty good

syruppity. who has everybody the maintain, had transfer rights to other general motors plants that were still going. so there were people who, since the plant closed, had been commuting to arlington, texas, and outside kansas city and ohio and michigan. some families were moving but most cases the gm worker was just commuting huge distances, coming home every week or month and matt from a very close family and had sworn he would not become what these people were called, which is gm gypsies. but he starts thinking about whether he should change his view of that because there was an offer on the table to transfer to fort wayne, indiana, which while nearly 300-mile airways was the closest transfer offer that had come along, and his instructor said, if i were you guys, i would take that offer and run for it because these utility jobs just aren't opening up.

older workers, their savings were wiped out in the reception and they're working for a while longer. so in march of 2010, matt begins futurer to fort wayne, indiana. he is still doing it. he leaves every monday morning, comes home on friday nights, commuting with other gm guys from janesville and has six more years to go until he is eligible for retirement. so that is how the wopats stayed in the middle class. so finally, there's the whitaker family, and jared whittaker was a gm employee, been the right erode the same time as mat wopat and thought that this work was going to come back. so he is kind of coasting, enjoying not working, never really liked working on the assembly line but thank the pays too good but the work doesn't come back eventually jared goes back to school, and exact same program that matt has in the utility lineman kind of work and

lasts two and a half weeks because what happens is that the instructor tells his students to form little groups and take about ten-foot-tall practice wooden pole, knock into it the ground and practice climbing, when jared's turn comes he climbs up the pole, loses his footing, and scrapes up his chest sliding down. and this just terrifies him and he thinks, okay, ten feet, i can happen that. what about if i were really on a utility pole and i get hurt, how much good am i going to do my wife ask three kid then? so he drops out of school after a matter of weeks, and starts bouncing in and out of the whole succession of bad pay jobs. the general motors plant was paying at the end $28 an hour. he is now making 12-13-$14 an hour deeding on the job, his wife is working two part-time jobs, not making much money and neither one and they've got three kids, including at the

time two twins who were in high school. so i met these girls, when they were high school seniors and they're great kids. their teachers love. the. in all the ap courses, college, bound. really good girls, and they were working between them five part-time jobs to help pay the family bills. so those are some of the family whose stories weave do you the coniology that my book tells, and the story is written in short chaptered with rotate perspectives the kid of kaleidoscopic quality i was shooting for, showing how things change over time for these families and these other people in the community who are trying to figure out that would do bet fact that all the good work has gone away. now issue wanted this book to be a closeup but i also wanted to find ways to make clear that these people whose experiences i

was very intimately -- i hoped i would file swim lat -- intimately chronicling were representative of a broader truth in the community. so here's where my inner nerd came out full force. i did two projects with academics to try to look at thing is was interested in. one was study of the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of job retraining. got a bunch of data from the department of work force development at the state, and the college black hawk tech was helpful and we mentalled the data sets and are basically were able to look at what happened to people who had been laid off around this time, who had and had not gone back to school, at black hawk tech, the dominant place where people were training in this part of southeastern wisconsin. and what we found was pretty counterintuitive. people who had retrained looking at what they were earning and how many of them wore working before the recession in 2007

compared to the dat we had was 2011. so nose as recently as now but a a good few years after all this work vanished. if they had gone back to school, they were less likely to have a job than people who had not retrained. they were like to to have had a big pay drop from before the recession to after waivered they were working, and they were more likely to have part-time work than full-time work, and if you want we can talk about why that turns tout have been the case. we sliced and dice they would data different ways to see if it was some way we look at it. we looked at people who just finished rather than people 0 who just start careers. people going into those fields that the college felt were the ones where jobs were most likely to exist elm looked at all kind of different subsets, trying to break that kind of negative pattern and just could not find any exceptions to it. so that was one set of nerdy work i was involved in as part

of this book's research. the other thing that i did -- and i did this actually while i was in residence at the universities, institute of research and poverty and worked with academics and with the university survey center, on a one-county survey. a rock county survey looking at people's economic experiences and attitudes. we did this work, the survey went out into they would field in first half of 2013 so five years after this work had gone away. and we asked basic things like, do you think the country is still in a recession or not? this is 2013. 75% said yes, they thought the country was still in a recession. we asked how their personal financial situation was? just over half said it was worse. only 18% said their situation was better. we asked if you owned a house, what has happened to your housing value in the last five

years? vast majority of people said their housing values were down. so i also wanted to know what was the prevalence of this job loss. so we asked a question about have you or anyone in your home lost a job in the last five years? just over a third said that was true of their home. so that is such a widespread job loss. and then we asked a set of questions about just of those people who said that job loss had faked their own household, what has happened? what has it been like and some of those questions were about the kind of emotional and social effects of losing work. and 75% said they had been losing sleep during this period. asked of a strain of family relationships during this time. 63% said yes. but the question that really i found heartbreaking was one that asked, do you feel ashamed or

embarrassed about being out of work? just over half, 53% said yes. that drove home to me in combination with the people i had got ton know over several years, how personal losing work is. even when you're losing a job, when thousands of your neighbors are lose thing exact same kind of work, at a time in this country's history that was the second worst economic period since the -- the worst economic period since the great depression, people were taking it very, very personally. so, i'm going to finish up by reading a little bit from a chapter late in the book about matt wopats inned night drive home. called "night drive" and i've been asked this elsewhere so i will just give you the clue. yes issue was in the back seat. come on, get the hell out of here, a guy shouts as he burs out the dispore speed walks across the lobby.

barely slowing, to slide his d. card through thank you punch clock. friday night at the fort wayne assembly plant. the end of the work week. the end of second shift, and nine-under hob shiftdive with a lucky hour's overtime so that's 11:45 p.m. as the sky is shouting, one guy among 1100 gmers, power offering the factory floor to start the weekend. amid this, matt reach the lobby at 11:47 wearing a knit cap, backpack over a shoulder. he is not running but he, too is walking very, very fast. a friday night ritual. he reaches the chilly night air and a coworker wish himself a safe drive tonight. he stopped for an instant at the 97 saturn which he parks in the same part of vast lot every friday night, and in the middle row, under a street lamp so he won't have to think about where he left his car when he returns on monday. he pulls his stuff out of otrunk

and walks very fast over to a nearby 2003 grand prix already idling. in the driver's seat is chris enemy back seat, hi scrunched between him and the floor is paul. janesville gm gypsies both. chris pop the trunk for matt to toss this duffle inside and slam the trunk shut before he gets in on the passenger side. matt's door is barclay closed win chris guns the engine and roars off. 280 miles to go. four hours and 35 minutes speeding just a little be where they're pretty sure they will not get caught. matt pulls out his phone, calls darcy to hell her they're leaving, same has he dose every week. when chris guns the engines it's 11:54:00 p.m. in fort wayne, except matt is not the only one who stays on jamesville time so the dashboard clock says 10:54. chris started working at the --

in fort wayne on august 17, 2009. seven months before matt. chris will never forget that day. his wife and kid along to help him move, comment the doesn't like to say he moved so he says he stays in fort wayne. any how, his family left on monday morning when he went to plant for orientation, which was during first shift so he was back in the new apartment by 3:30 that afternoon, and he sat on a chair from a cheap dineet set staring at the wall him wifes and kid already become in janesville. one of the worst feelings of his life. that was three and a half years ago. the grand prix has 47,000 miles on it. now it has 134,407. on this night, they're not yet ten minutes from the plant, about to turn on to route 114, when matt says in his quiet way, this is my three-year anniversary. chris doesn't miss a beat weapon aren't going to celebrate that,

he shoots back. matt already had text if darcy before going to work. happy anniversary to me, three years. and the rye play came back, has it bin three years? seems a lot longer. darcy had added a sad face emoticon. three years even with gm vacations factored in is a lot of fridays hurtling through the night to get hem this. week it snowed ten inches in fort wayne but then it thawed and today was sunny. tonight is clear so the stars are bright on the drive through the india farmland so much natter than wisconsin. think we'll get lucky and get a double raccoon continue? last summer on this stretch of route 114 with exquisite timening one raccoon ran into the road from the left another from the right and the grand prix instruct them back. one with the front expire one with rear. don't get that every week but they do get the house alongside

the road who out ofs have a flair torn czech rating, tonight it's lit up like christmas bus in green and gold with shamrocks for st. patrick's day coming up. and now the bend north for awe few miles and then west on to u.s. 30, four lanes divided, which chris and paul and matt agree is a better way to go than in the indiana toll roth road that a gypsies take, u.s. 30 gives them chance in the summer to guess what is playing at the drive-in movie theater just off the road. not chris, but whoever i driving but the passengers craning their nicks to get a quick peek at the screen at an angle. and one time they drove through a giant thunderstorm, with lightning bolts that along this flat land of long views they could see shooting straight down into the fields. no matter the season there's always the bourbon bible church with a weird larger than life

dieram -- dia ram a. matt's found rings, it's his daughter. in indiana he says three yours probably, okay, sweetie,'ll let you go. i love you, too. and now they're in valparaiso where they standstop at a truck stop as always. some of the james have i gipsies wait until in the next fastfood stop, the last one before the illinois line, but chris and paul and matt like this one for its good snacks snacks and multe bathrooms. then it's north on to highway 49 and west on to the toll road. you're going under the speed limit, says paul who has mostly been sleeping. fuck, says kris, want at the tire towable off? you know how to change a tire, paul says, matt jumps in, saying, you're doing a good job, chris, thanks, chris says, you're very supportive. and now they're whizzing by gary with what remains of the steel mills own the right lights

sparkle, gray smoke plumes dissolving into the sky, flick over flames. gary was known as magic city when u.s. steel arrived in 1906. to build the mills on the south side of lake michigan. now its population of 78,000 is less than have half of what it was in 1960. four in ten of them people still living there are in poverty. gary is a perfect specimen of what the rust belt looks like in and what janesville is striving not become. chris drives on. it us almost 1 can 30:00 a.m. janesville time when the grand prix glides through a toll booth and enters illinois. the styway and then then dan ryan expressway which is clog even with 14 lands. this it's yesy 0 cruise because of the extra hour at plant this overtime, later than usual and most of the city of big shoulders is is asleep.

the downtown skyline comes into view. just north of chicago, a red car pass' with four guys inside. tom is drop i -- tom is driving marks janesville jim sis. mat doses off for a few minutes, joining paul in his slum her. chris doesn't like the violence. you're supposed to be doing color commentary he teases matt good thing matt is awake when after 2:00 a.m. a takes arrives on his phone. it's from yet another car filled with janesville gypsies up ahead. mile marker 28 or so cop in the median. chris slows. nine miles later, matt spot this cop. no likey tickets, chris says, can't afford. to the one time matt got pulled over, the summer before last, he told the officers the truth. that he works in fort wayne during the week, and was driving home, and he guested he was just a little bit excited to get

there and see his family. the cop said he could understand and let matt off. they passed the chrysler plant that wasn't hiring when he aim see by plants shuts down. we the get to rock ford chris says, the home stretch. holy shit we are nearly home, matt says. paul continues his gentle snores and at this hour, 2:41 janesville time, chris gets philosophical. funny how we covent time i count home claim is have to spend there. three more. he is coming up on 27 years since he became a gmer on august 17, 1986. part of a big hiring wave that came right after janesville survived a near death experience. when the last day really came, december 23, 2008, chris was down at the plant, shooting video of with a digital camera,

his anniversary dade means that chris has three years and seven months until he can retire. matt has 12 years and seven months. when i retire, chris says, don't want to leave you guys there. i want everyone home. maybe that will be my business after retire. i'll be a shuttle guy and bring you guys home. paul wakes up as the grand prix pulls off the interstate at exit 177. cool your jets, chris says to paul, i'll have you home in a heartbeat. just after 3:00 a.m. janesville time because this is janesville. when chris pulls into paul's driveway. after dropping him off, chris drives up center avenue, crossing the rock river near where the assembly plant still stands vacant. up center street and then milton after knew matt's nice house on the north edge of town that he and darcy have hanged to keep because he is a gypsy. it's a straight shot up through town, but sometime they'd go through town different ways just because it's nice to be home,

nice to see janesville streets. at 3:20 a.m. chris pulls into the driveway hover the beige house where its dark front door. darcy has not enderel tomorrow town on i out light but left the light on in the laundry room, just inside the garage door, where she and the girls once cried when matt was living for the first time. matt ands crist a $20 bill for gas and oil changes when the grand prix neats them. why um monday morning? matt kansass just before pull his duffel out of the trunk? probably 8:10, 8:15, chris says. the usual. thank you very much. [applause] >> i think we have ten minute ford question and i'm developed it's a good idea you come to the

microphone so the questions can be picked up. >> i think somebody is coming up. >> thank you for writing this wonderful book. i have a chance to read it. a couple of months ago, and just before going to sleep i'm not sure that was the best idea because when i got to the part offices the book where the high school teacher and the social worker were struggling so mightily to fulfill their vision for their respective programs to try to help the kids and and the families, there was also the reading about the business

leaders in the community and their efforts, the banker and the especially diane hendrix who is suspect is pretty well known in this room, and seeing how the teacher and the social worker were struggling so mightily and how one of the richest women in the country, right in that community, not even sure if she was aware of what those school staff were trying to do, but who could have very easily supported what they were doing and i was wondering if you -- i can't remember the details. did you have an opportunity to actually interview diane hendrix and you get a sense for how much she was aware of the pain that was going on in that community? >> that's a good question. so, before i talk about die ran hendrix, let me say that as i was -- went along doing this research, i came up with this phrase in the book chit that there were two janesvilles, the pretty -- it wasn't a model everywhere aft mitt point.

there were people who were more affluent, harder times always, democrats predominantly and also republicans in town. a place that was pretty -- where people got along. it sound a little like "it's a wonderful life but pi but this was a place where people were pretty collegial. and i think when all those work started to go away, some people in town were acutely aware of the pain and other people weren't seeing it, defending on their own van take point. and when the social worker -- a woman named anne, just on a panel with in janesville two nights ago -- when she and this other social worker began trying to raise money for housing for this unaccompanied homeless teianers, a filmmaker made a little documentary called 1649, which stood for the number of hours and minutes between the end of one cool day and the beginning of the next with the

idea being that that's a very long period of time for a kid who doesn't have a steady place to be. to sleep. they began showing this film, and people in the community were just shocked that these homeless kids existed. this was not janesville's conception of itself. so there really were different levels of sensitivity to what was going on. as for diane hendrix, she has been -- during the five years i'm writing about from 2008 to 2013, and since, been very, very supportive of economic development in beloit but not in janesville. she she and her husband have a young adults standard in the janesville and fells that jains veil was not hospitable 0 tell and they went to beloit and her husband is no longer alive, died tragically a number of year others but her money has gone to

economic development one town south of janesville. yes. >> the book to me northwest blow -- inevitably raises the question of corporate responsibility and government responsibility. in these situations. and i just wonder debt your thoughts on that. >> well, there's one scene in the book where matt wopat is making a hard decision to start commuting, and as explained it to me he was trying to figure out who to blame for this jam he was in. and he couldn't figure out who to blame because he felt that the company, which has laid him off, was for a couple year still paying him benefits and health insurance and the company was going to go bankrupt a year later so he -- wasn't happy to have lost his work but could understand that the company was in a position to try to get rid of personnel.

the federal government was paying tuition for his job retraining. so there were all these policies that were intended to cushion people that didn't always do it. >> i was wondering, what was the understanding of the families as to why this was happening to them in janesville? and does this give us any understanding for the rise of economic nationalism and perhaps some form of trumpism? >> yeah. so, that's an interesting question about what their political meaning people attach to the jobs having gone away...

i woke up and you can imagine the first and it was grandson my computer to see how they voted. and clinton got 52 percent. so it was still democratic but the margin was obviously much thinner. when i looked at the raw numbers, it was not that people had switched parties with the democratic turnout would ãwas way down. i did think about what was the meaning of the harsh experience of losing good work in this community that wasn't a trump board and community places that were trump board and committees. i guess what i have come to

think that the kind of economic experience of the people had in janesville, if they happened in other is in the country that did not have such long ingrained, democratic traditions, might have made a candidate who was espousing change. that was rhetoric attractive. but it was not to flip janesville. yes? >> i'm a student here and we read your book for public policy class to request i love to hear that! >> what was the class? >> instruction to public policy. [laughter] one aspect that we found really interesting was that we have the edge in education is a civil bullet however, as we show education did not actually make people's lives better in fact usually makes those people's lives worse. for someone has studied social policy for a couple of decades, what are your ideas towards how we should address making sure

that workers have opportunities and with education without education. and that people can better themselves? >> is a pretty heavy question. [laughter] you know, i think the job retraining is not always a bad idea. it depends on the context and with some that i was working on this study i began to see these counterintuitive findings. i did a lot of talking to people about what confidence. and one possibility is that if i had stated that when -- people would be doing better. on the other hand unemployment rates are we debit pay is still way down. it is below four percent in

janesville. it was over 13 percent in early 2009 a few months after all of this work vanished.but the pay is nothing like $28 an hour. so i think in communities in which jobs are going to come back or are coming back, retraining for new work is a great idea. and i think that bob, the head of the job center that is one of the heads of the story, ended up feeling kind of guilty because he had been encouraging his death to encourage all of these people to retrain. on what was a very sound premise that turned out to be wrong. the premise is that if you look at past recessions, jobs would recover every certain period of time. and it turned out nationally and locally and this recession took much longer for johnson structure come back. i mean i think that what i found is not an indictment of the junction but you have to look at what the climate is in these early people to work after they go back to school.

>> you are observing janesville during the ramp-up of the affordable care act. in what way do you think that the effects of that law were felt in janesville and does janesville as a whole, were the dislocated workers specifically, do they feel as if it was a good thing? or are they in the camp that was against or how is this split i guess?>> i wrote that the us the question because my day job at the washington post is to cover healthcare policy. nice synthesis here. but i have to tell you that the main part of the chronology of this story as part way through 2013. and it was not until the fall of 2013 that people can start rolling in the insurance exchanges to the affordable care act. so the time that i was specifically looking at predated that. and there was this little

clinic right downtime janesville new called healthnet. that was seeing a lot of people during this time ancil has pretty good patient base. they were holding fundraiser after fundraiser and cannot manage to get enough money to see everybody who needed to be seen. and it would have been patients. i know it is not in the story but i know that the mix of people who do and do not have insurance has changed and in janesville and in wisconsin even though wisconsin has not been very supportive state of getting the word out on his health insurance. on the affordable care act. that said, there is just a story this week in the janesville gazette saying that healthnet may be getting some budget cuts at the local level. because of some changes in state policy regarding how much

funding localities can put into nonprofits. so all these years later it is still a little bit vulnerable. i am told that this all the time we have. thank you very much. [applause] >> çwisconsin book festival continues now with doug stanton who tells the story about the vietnam war chan -- tet offensive. >> thank you for hosting this fabulous book festival. i am happy to be participating in this. and delid