Last night I watched a couple of TV shows on PBS, including an American Masters episode on Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell that actually dated from 2012 and a new Frontline, “Left Behind America,” about the financial collapse of Dayton, Ohio and how it, like a lot of formerly industrial cities in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, is trying to claw back economically. The story of Dayton is all too familiar: though Dayton’s principal claim to fame to the outside world is as the home of Wilbur and Orville Wright and the place where they build the world’s first successful powered airplane, it was best known to its residents as the founding city of the National Cash Register corporation and also as the site of the General Motors plant that was the largest auto factory in the U.S. outside Detroit. Then, starting in the 1970’s, U.S. corporations came down hard on their workers, breaking unions and moving their production overseas, resulting in those hideous photos of the insides of factories looking as if bombs had been set off. In a country that has no industrial policy and inexplicably prides itself on that — just as we so inexplicably pride ourselves on being the only advanced industrial country in the world that doesn’t guarantee its citizens access to health care as a right — no one thought that even if the people and companies who built those factories no longer felt they could use them profitably, it might be a good idea to save that infrastructure and do something with it.
The story of Dayton is almost
mind-numbingly familiar — globalization led to the shuttering of its industrial
capacity and the devastation of its local economy, since too few people were
working to sustain the local infrastructure of businesses that had once
existed. National Cash Register and GM shut down those big factories and just
threw the people who’d been employed there out of work, and though a Chinese
company called Fuyao Auto Glass just bought the big GM factory and restored it
to produce windshields — and rehired some of the old GM workers — it also paid
them considerably less, $12 per hour, rising to $12.84 after you’ve been there
six months. (Admittedly $12 goes a lot farther in Ohio than it does in
California.) Fuyao founder Cho Tak Wong (speaking in Chinese and translated
with subtitles) explains that the reason he relocated in the U.S. is “because
the U.S. deindustrialization policy has wiped out my American competitors.
Almost all American-owned companies in our industry are gone. There was no way
for them to survive.” There are interviews with people who run the St. Vincent
de Paul food pantry, including a woman who explains that most of the people who
get food aid from there are actually employed — a lot of times, she says, they
ask her to give them their food early enough that they can pick it up on their
way to work — and also an explanation of how the prescription opiate crisis hit
Dayton particularly hard. They were in a big-time target market for the makers of
drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin, largely because those good-paying industrial
jobs that used to exist there were also highly stressful physically and a lot
of people ended up in chronic long-term pain and eagerly grabbed these drugs
from their doctors, who relied on the assurance of the drug companies that made
them that they were “non-addictive.” A lot of people in Dayton who started out
on prescription opiates for pain ended up addicted to heroin — including a
young woman named Ashley Sturgill whose partner Josh Hunter recalls how it
started and how it ended: “I knew she was on the pills and, and I thought she
got clean. But actually, she would use the bathroom a lot and lock the door and
turn the water on. One day I picked the lock on the bathroom door and opened
it, and she had a needle stuck in her arm. That’s when I knew for sure.”
What
struck me about this program was how the people in Dayton seem to have accepted
that they’re going to get poorer and are coping as best they can with a sullen
stoicism; filmmaker Shimon Dotan avoided any discussion of the political impact of the decline in
Dayton — if any — and what’s struck me about this as well as similar
documentaries I’ve seen in the past is the absence of any sense among the victims that the political system
offers them any hope of a solution. Ohio went for Donald Trump in the 2016
election (no Republican has ever
been elected President without carrying Ohio) but there’s no discussion from
any of the residents that they expect him to make things better or even arrest
the decline: they’ve just accepted
it the way they might accept a hurricane, as an “act of God” over which they
had no control and about which they could do nothing. Partly this is the old
American tradition of regarding misfortune as something you don’t cry over or
ask for help — you pick yourself up, adjust to the new conditions, and do the
best you can in the new environment — and partly, I suspect, it’s also because
on at least some level Ohioans, like many other Americans, are aware that both major political parties are in thrall to the 1
percent who bankroll their campaigns and therefore have written off political
activism as a potential source of solutions.
