Nothin' but Blue Skies

March 11, 2013
It is no secret that the area surrounding the Great Lakes, once the beating heart of American manufacturing, has fallen on hard times. A native of Lansing, Mich., home of Oldsmobile, McClelland, author of Young Mr. Obama and The Third Coast, sets out to chart the rise and fall of these towns and the people who call them home. Whether he is talking about Flint, Mich., Detroit, Syracuse, N.Y., or Homestead, Pa., he details similar stories: mills started by men like Ford or Carnegie that create jobs, union wars that help workers reach unprecedented middle-class prosperity, market or political changes that create cracks in the business causing it either move, lose market share to international competition, or simply go bankrupt, thereby creating pensioner filled ghost towns devoid of jobs and youth. The stories can be a bit repetitive, but McClelland’s knack for turning a phrase “My last two full-time jobs no longer exist. For a Generation-Xer, tales from the 1960s are employment porn.”) allows him to tie together these auto and steel towns and capture touching, personal tales so as to bring these dying municipalities back to life, if only on the page. Though the bright spots are few and far between, thanks to intervening stories of crime, drugs, and gangs, he tries his best to find tales of hopes, as in the revival of Homestead as a shopping destination or how one can now kayak down Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, once so polluted it would catch on fire. A reservoir of information about American manufacturing, labor unions, and social movements, McClelland’s book, ironically, stands as a testament to the simple truth that one steel worker told him: “You can’t grow an economy without making things, producing stuff.”

April 1, 2013
Chicago journalist McClelland (Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President, 2010, etc.) examines the decline of urban industrial centers in the Midwestern United States and portions of the Great Lakes region. A native of Lansing, Mich., one of those declining centers, the author presents impressively reported case studies and anecdotes from such cities as Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Cleveland and Chicago, among others. The closing of factories--those that manufacture automobiles have been the most common--is no secret. Nor is the decline of labor unions, the desperation of the unemployed, the accompanying crime, racial tensions, environmental degradation and the moving of jobs to Mexico and overseas. But McClelland helps to make the old feel new by drawing on a combination of personal contacts, extensive interviewing and acute observation based on showing up and hanging out. Little-known details emerge throughout. How many readers already knew, for example, that Buffalo is the locale of perhaps the first Muslim settlement in the United States? Those Muslims, mostly from the nation of Yemen at first, arrived to take advantage of the attractive jobs in the since-shuttered steel mills. Everywhere throughout the industrialized cities, immigrant tribes gathered to forge steel in the mills and accept other demanding positions in factories, positions numerous American citizens were unwilling to take. But the Rust Belt grew rustier and rustier, as an appellation that formerly denoted pride came to signify poverty and unemployment. Rebirth in some sections of a few of the down-and-out cities seems possible, but mostly, hopelessness is ascendant and elected politicians and their financial supporters show little initiative in assisting the unemployed or underemployed. Though McClelland offers few solutions for industrialized urban centers, his book is admirably long on explanation and empathy.

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April 15, 2013
To a steelworker, autobuilder, or shop rat, blue skies unclouded by smog spell unemployment and economic disaster. In this elegy for the bustling industrial cities of the Midwest, McClelland not only examines what was once the Arsenal of Democracy and is now the Rust Belt, but also profiles the people caught in the decline, from regular Joes to such high-profile figures as Dennis Kucinich and Michael Moore. Focusing on personal tales of woe with sympathy and verve, McClelland brings home the impact of the titanic shift in industry in the last half of the twentieth century. That history is also largely the history of labor unions, whose battles are displayed in full force. Along the way, McClelland provides snapshots of his own journey, which started in a Michigan school next to an auto plant. The result provides an answer for anyone who has ever looked at a shuttered factory and asked, Why?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)