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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

She Was Born A Domestic Manufacturing Fetishist’s Daughter

A letter from a Detroit-area woman whose father worked in a paper mill
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(Photo above: Detroit autoworkers circa 1959)

A reader writes about the case of Adam Posen, the well-paid "woke capitalist for social justice" who said the other day that people only care about domestic manufacturing out of "a fetish for keeping white males with low educations in the powerful positions they are in." She responds:

What guys like this don't get is that building things is our cultural identity. I live in the Detroit area and everyone takes pride in what we do here, even if we aren't directly involved in it. Our neighbors and friends tend to work at GM, Ford, or what used to be Fiat Chrysler (I've lost track of the name changes). (And now the 'imports' too). Or knows someone who does.  It doesn't matter if they are the working class or the manager class, we all know people who build and make or design cars and their parts. It's part of our family stories.  

A lot of my older friends talk about how their parents immigrated here after WW2 and worked at the autos and how that became a new chapter in their family story. If we aren't working for the Big 3 directly, there's a good chance that we work for one of their suppliers or in a support industry. Manufacturing and building things is what we do here. It's not like it was in previous decades, but everyone knows this area would be screwed without the car makers and the suppliers. If we aren't doing manufacturing, it's sports.Throw in medicine and farming and that's what my area of the world looks like. Cars, Detroit or college sports, doctors, shopping/consumerism and farm land (I live in an exurb). It's not particularly sophisticated and most the people are okay with that.    

Ann Arbor, which is 20 minutes south of my location, plays the Progressive social justice game. The difference in the brands of Liberalism are quite stark because you see the tension between the working class and the intellectual class trying to define what it means to be 'progressive'. But being working class is just a different mentality than being an intellectual progressive. You don't get your hands dirty to be an intellectual progressive. There seems to be this idea that we've transcended the need to do manual and menial labor.     And that's just not true.    

I moved to the area from Kalamazoo and that area did paper, cars, and pharmaceuticals. My dad and his friends worked at the paper mill and even though he had a menial job, he was proud of his accomplishments.   He was a solid working class guy. Even when he lost that job, it was still a point of pride for him to have worked there. The paper mill is long gone and my dad passed last year. Kalamazoo is different now than when I was growing up there. It seems hollow, even if it's been filled in with new stores and services. People just don't take pride from shopping. Intellectual progressives who love globalization just can't make that true.     

You can't take away someone's identity and culture and act like there aren't consequences.  My dad was super proud of being who he was, even though it wasn't much. Kalamazoo, manufacturing and the history of the area were big parts of that story for him and, in turn, became big parts of my story. That story was his legacy and all those previous generations of workers and farmers he was descended from meant something to him. I'm kind of sad that Kalamazoo won't be a big part of my son's history, but he will be connected to the Detroit area in ways that I'm just not. He's a native whereas I'm a transplant and I know it. But Detroit has its own stories and he will create his life here or somewhere else. Who knows what the future will bring any of us?    

From a reader in Texas:

My dad grew up in a small town in rural western Tennessee where we went every holiday when my grandmother was still living. It was anchored by a garment factory well into the 90s, and when we visited we shopped at the actual 'factory outlet' store, which was very different than the so-called outlet stores that line the highways in exurbs now. It was a small, but stable town with a healthy school, lots of non-college educated people that were not wealthy but could still get by. Of course when the garment manufacturer was shipped overseas the town basically collapsed. My dad inherited the old house he grew up in and that my grandmother died in, but it was essentially worthless by then, and was just sold to the city and torn down. By now the town is mostly just people like my grandmother at the end of their lives and some other people like correctional facility workers, and those that don't know where else to go. The population has declined consistently since about 2000, maybe 10 percent a year on an already small population less than 1,500. I honestly wonder if the town could go away completely, or if they'll be giving away houses there in another 10 or 20 years. 

We read all these statistics about men struggling and the connection to household formation, home ownership, and other markers of middle class status - unemployment, petty crime, drug use, etc. Driving to work this morning, I looked at this guy next to me on the highway in an old Honda civic mostly painted in primer, probably mid-30s and seemed pretty rough, another guy aimlessly walking under the bridge by my exit (there's now a huge homeless population here, though there wasn't 10 years ago), and I thought about what it would possibly take to get someone like those guys to the point of just lower middle class and self-sustaining, and it seems like a gulf too far to fill with temporary or retail work. I know it takes initiative, drug abstinence, discipline, timeliness, and certain values, but sometimes it seems pretty hopeless given the way the towns like my dad's have been so hollowed out. 

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MPC
MPC
Historians of the future will marvel that powerful people at the zenith of our country's power thought that removing key economic and social institutions from ordinary people's lives would be free of consequences.
schedule 1 year ago
Lloyd Conway
Lloyd Conway
I was born in Detroit, raised just across 8 Mile and what's written here resonates with this janitor's son. The other commonplace, aside from ties to making things, is to military service. Most of my male teachers, if they were older, served in World War II or Korea. So did Dad, our uncles, neighbors, etc. I has World War II vets for neighbors at several Michigan addresses near-continuously, until 2015. UAW cards and VFW memberships were staples of of blue-collar identity.
While he was singing about Youngstown, Springsteen could've had my hometown in mind: "These mills made the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars.....now the yards are scrap and rubble; my Daddy said them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do."
Class warfare has been waged relentlessly against blue-collar America for as long as I can remember. They used to at least pay lip service to solidarity. They've won so often that they don't see the need to lie about their intentions any more.
schedule 1 year ago