For a complete schedule visit booktv. Org. Now on booktv, Edward Mcclelland reports on Americas Industrial midwest, also known as the rust belt. The author examines the regions oncepowerful Manufacturing Centers and how their demise has resulted in the exodus of local populations in search of employment. Its 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 theyd 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 its 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 didnt 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 didnt get a good job. I remember being fascinated by stories from baby boom with autoworkers about how easy theyd 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. Thats over, too, which well 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 didnt have a job. So my friend larry had to tell his dad kids these days dont 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, wed 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. Hes 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 gms 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 wasnt so big that the company couldnt build cars too, it wasnt a total war. From 19651969 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 20some 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 thats mostly what i want to talk about today, because one of the points i tried to mix make in this book is the nations 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 sitdown 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. Im going to talk about how his life reflected the prosperity of the mid century middle class. One of the last surviving sitdown 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 lansings 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. Hes 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 gms financial crisis. Everett cackled. I dont know where id be living without it, he said. My two sisters is gone. I really dont know where id be if i didnt have where i had. How long are my benefits going to last because im 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 . Everetts father wanted to be a farmer, but he Congress Make corn and beans grow but he couldnt 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 carriagemaking capital. A scottishborn tinkerer named buick formed the country that became General Motors. For a factory town, war meant work. In the teens and 20s, flints population quadrupled. Gm headhunters sought out dirt farmers all over the midwest and the Mississippi Valley handing them oneway tickets to the vehicle city as flint nicknamed itself. The newcomers slept in shacks, tents and railroad cars. Earls 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 brotherinlaw, 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 youre all done. On november 12th, three welders conducted a short prounion sitdown 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 michigans newlyelected new deal golf, frank murphy, would be sworn in. But the week after christmas, the company forced the unions 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 sitdown 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 sitdown strike was the most important event of everetts career. It made his working mans 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. Americas 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 boys gratitude for his good fortune. Born half a century later, i assumed universal prosperity was a natural progress of human life. Im begunking to assume im 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 . Americas 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 thats 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, theres 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 didnt have to fill up every day, but the American Auto companies didnt want to build small cars. Theyd 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 thats 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 ands 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 wont 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 antiinflationary Interest Rates set by president carter. People couldnt afford the gas to fill a car or alone to buy one with. They couldnt 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 Obamas career as a community organizer. So thats the tiein 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 didnt 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 12pack of beer, damn the citys 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 didnt 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