Corporate Wasteland

David Lewis, Steven High

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781926662077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Deindustrialization is not simply an economic process; it is also a social and cultural phenomenon. The rusting detritus of our industrial past-the wrecked halls of factories, abandoned machinery too large to remove, and now-useless infrastructures-has for decades been a part of the North American landscape. Through a unique blend of oral history, photographs, and interpretive essays, Corporate Wasteland investigates this fascinating terrain and the phenomenon of its loss and rediscovery.

PART I

THE DEINDUSTRIAL SUBLIME

CHAPTER 1

INDUSTRIAL DEMOLITION AND THE MEANING OF ECONOMIC CHANGE IN NORTH AMERICA

The cars that stop along Joseph Campeau Street ignore the “no standing” signs and sit there, their motors sighing idly, their drivers watching silently as wrecking balls chew away on a piece of the past. The old Dodge Main car plant is going down, and its destruction is a jumbled symbol of distress and progress in the city of Detroit, which surrounds this little urban village, as well as an emblem of a lost era when the automobile industry was still a golden magnet for workers around the country and the world.

– Iver Peterson

ROOSEVELT JOHNSON SAT IN HIS 1976 DODGE CORONET ONE wintry day in January 1981, watching the destruction of Detroit’s Dodge Main auto plant, his former workplace. It was his third visit to see the dying plant. Johnson had moved to Detroit from a Mississippi farm, at age eighteen.When he walked through the factory gates for the first time, he thought he had it made. Johnson’s hold onto middle class status, however, was a tenuous one. Autoworkers enjoyed middle class wages in good times, but risked layoffs and plant closures in bad times, and these were the worst of times in the “Motor City.” Johnson had not worked since Dodge Main closed two years earlier in January 1979. The sight of machinery tearing apart the multi-storey factory hurt; it was “his family in there, good times and bad, and you see, it’s like a piece of my life going down.”¹

Henry Rembecki, a Polish immigrant, had also come to say goodbye to his factory. He sat nearby in his Dodge van, silently watching. Like Johnson, Henry Rembecki had forged a personal connection to the auto plant: “That place has been a homestead to me. I know every hole in the place, I’ve worked from one end of it to another. I put three kids through school on it.”² He agreed that “progress is progress,” but he would still like to see cars being produced at Dodge Main. In stating his views this way, Rambecki was clearly acknowledging another viewpoint – one that he believed to be the prevailing one – that the plant’s demolition constituted progress. The planned reindustrialization of the Dodge Main site was small consolation to the unemployed men lined up outside the gates.

We know what was running through the minds of these two men only because Iver Peterson, a New York Times journalist, went up to their idling vehicles, and asked them. As Peterson made his way from one American-made vehicle to the next, he heard starkly similar stories of hardship and hurt from the occupants. It was, he said, as though there was a “thread of an unspoken conversation between the silent watchers and rememberers dotting the curb.”

In search of another vantage point, Peterson walked through the factory gates and into the demolition contractor’s trailer. There he found the white-helmeted Jim Saunders. Peterson asked him what he thought about the silent vigil occurring outside the fence. Saunders replied that: “There are people who walked in and out of these gates for thirty-five years. They come by and point and say, ‘I worked at that window up there,’ then they pick up [a] brick or a piece of stone and go away.”³ These autoworkers had spent their lives working in the assembly plant and in the process had forged strong attachments to people and place. Workplace communities were remembered warmly that frigid day.

The story unfolding outside the gate at Dodge Main has been repeated in towns and cities across North America. We live in a “post-industrial” age, or so we are told. Mill and factory work no longer defines North American society and it is fast losing its saliency at the regional and local levels as well. Manufacturing and other blue-collar sectors are in a forty-year decline. In the United States, manufacturing represented 21 percent of overall employment in 1985, but only 16 percent in 2000.⁴ The decline of manufacturing in Canada has not been as sharp, but a spate of recent mill closings in the forestry, auto, rubber, and manufacturing sectors is erasing this national difference. Millions of North Americans have lost their blue-collar jobs, and towns that once defined themselves as industrial are being forced to reinvent themselves as something other.

Plant closings and their subsequent demolition are secular rituals that dramatize North America’s transition from industrialism to post-industrialism. Just as the plague was met by order (quarantine and body pick-up) in seventeenth-century Europe, deindustrialization was met by order in late twentieth-century North America.⁵ The demolition of industrial buildings, of all shapes and sizes, but especially landmark structures that dominated their surroundings, was widely represented in the electronic and print media. When images of the demolition were recorded and represented, the same event also served to reinforce the sense of inevitability surrounding industrial decline, a sense that prevails nationally and internationally. The “thread” of the “unspoken conversation” that the reporter heard outside the fence of the dying Dodge Main plant in Detroit thus extended far and wide, becoming part of a far larger unspoken conversation about the economic changes underway.

By analyzing the rituals and representations of industrial demolition, we can ascertain the prevailing meaning of economic change in North America since the 1970s. Deindustrialization is, clearly, much more than an economic process involving job loss. It involves the displacement of industry and industrial workers to the cultural periphery. Industrial demolitions serve as the “ritual context within which a symbolic transformation can occur.”⁶ As anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley notes,

I think the symbolism of a plant closing is about the meaning of change itself. The abandonment, gentrification, and outright destruction of old factory buildings signifies not just social change, but a particular kind of social change. When chrome and glass skyscrapers rise out of the rubble of an industrial plant, when bombed-out factories are left to crumble in urban wastelands where vibrant communities once thrived, the message is not just about the inevitability of change, but about the obsolescence of the past.⁷

We will explore this cultural shift in two important ways. First, we will re.examine the landscapes of exclusion and abandonment that spatialized economic rise and decline in North America. Second, we will examine industrial demolitions as secular ritual. Industrialism has lost its cultural centrality in North America. Industrial workers who once inhabited a central place have been displaced to the periphery: they have become outsiders looking in. Job loss has meant far more than losing a pay cheque for these blue-collar workers; it has meant losing a fundamental part of themselves, part of their inner being.

LANDSCAPES OF ECONOMIC EXCLUSION

The perceived shift from industrialism to post-industrialism frames our understanding of the meaning of economic change. It infuses our language – “old” versus “new” economy, “sunset” versus “sunrise” industries – and our sense of what the future will hold. It also shapes our sense of geography. The economic geography of North America reflects its changing place in international political economy and in the international division of labour. The impermanence of industrial landscapes is apparent to anyone; capitalism creates and destroys built landscapes.⁸ More to the point, corporate capital’s command of spatial relations, through investment and disinvestment, becomes a crucial weapon in management’s arsenal in its fight with organized labour.⁹ This process of creative destruction, and its accompanying geography of rise and decline, is the essential fact of capitalism.¹⁰

Michel Foucault has shown that human societies contain their problems: imprisoning criminals, institutionalizing the insane, hospitalizing the sick, and imaginatively localizing racial “others” in “Chinatowns,” “Indian Reservations,” and “Black Ghettos.” Economic problems are similarly spatialized and categorized into a hierarchy of “have” and “have-not” regions of the mind. These “have-not” places can span vast geographic distances (“Appalachia”), or small ones (the “Lower East Side” in Vancouver).

The Rust Belt is a case in point. Many of the industrial cities of the northern tier of the United States were overwhelmed by racial strife and deindustrialization.¹¹ The “Rust Belt” label thus emerged in the 1980s as a northern counterpoint to the ascendant “Sun Belt.” It was imaginatively tied to the Great Lakes states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania and western New York. The abandoned industrial areas of the northeastern United States are sometimes included, as are declining industrial districts in other regions.¹² The discourse of industrial decline and the emergence of the Rust Belt label provided a spatial fix for Americans’ generalized insecurities and complaints about economic change in the late twentieth century.¹³

The Rust Belt label, however, did not spill over into Canada. Ontario’s “Golden Horseshoe” did not rust.¹⁴ In Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, I argued that Canadian trade unionists wrapped themselves in the maple leaf flag in order to politicize the plant closing issue. In sharp contrast to their counterparts in the United States, Canadian politicians passed a variety of laws designed to soften the blow of job loss. To what degree this politically-charged atmosphere influenced corporate decision-making as well, is impossible to know for certain, but there was no mistaking the fact that companies (especially foreign multinationals) that closed plants in Canada could pay a political price in the 1970s and early 1980s. Before Free Trade, the politics of Canadian nationalism acted to constrain managerial prerogative to close mills and factories at will. In some instances, political pressure in Canada even resulted in the reopening of closed plants under public or employee ownership.¹⁵

Author Carlo Rotella nevertheless reminds us that “there’s still plenty of manufacturing, but it’s not what it used to be. It’s not at the center of city life any more.”¹⁶ Working in a factory to provide a middle class life for your family is, according to Kathryn Marie Dudley, “no longer considered a legitimate goal.” Industrial workers are increasingly subjected to ridicule, censure, and even blame. They were, Dudley concludes, the new “American primitive” – they belonged to the past, not to the present: “In America’s new image of itself as a postindustrial society, individuals still employed in basic manufacturing industries look like global benchwarmers in the competitive markets of the modern world.”¹⁷ It appears that vanishing auto and forestry workers have dislodged the “vanishing Indian” from the North American imagination.

INDUSTRIAL DEMOLITION AS SECULAR RITUAL

If the imagined geographies of “Rust Belt” and “hinterland” have served to quarantine the blue-collar flu in North America, the transition to a new post-industrial era was made visible in the ritualized act of industrial demolition. Ceremony and ritual are often used to lend authority and legitimacy to particular persons, interests, world views, and moral orders.¹⁸ Secular rituals, like sacred ones, are traditionalizing instruments mounted with the intention to establish a sense of stability and continuity through repetition and order. In this case, the repetitive images of falling smokestacks and imploding mills and factories lead to predictability and, ironically, the promise of continuity in a time of transformation. Secular rituals are declarations against indeterminacy and serve to hide troubles, conflicts, and uncertainties. ¹⁹ By discouraging enquiry, the ritualized and routinized demolition of industrial sites naturalizes these changes, even as they are used to interpret things which are very much in doubt. According to Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, “ceremony can make it appear that there is no conflict, only harmony, no disorder, only order, that if danger threatens, safe solutions are at hand, that political unity is immediate and real because it is celebrated, and so on.”²⁰ The post-industrial ethos is graphically represented by the “wrecking ball,” the falling smokestack, the pulverized grain elevator, and the shattering implosion.

THE “WRECKING BALL” AND “HISTORIC BUILDINGS” IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Since 1945, the wrecking ball (or “wrecker’s ball”) has loomed large in public debates about urban change in North America. A keyword search of the indexes of the Toronto Globe and Mail and the New York Times revealed hundreds of articles that discussed and debated urban renewal, slum clearances, development, and historic preservation. By the 1970s the wrecker’s ball was being employed regularly by preservationists as a rhetorical weapon in their campaign to save “historic buildings.” In 1977, for example, the Globe editorialized that “nothing stood up to the wrecker’s ball” in post-war Toronto: “We were in a frame of mind that associated newness with improvement and progress; antiquity with decay and inertia.”²¹ The wrecking ball was a useful image to draw upon in these large debates about urban change.

In 1972, at least one Canadian journalist took a closer look at the wrecking ball...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization
• Part I: The Deindustrial Sublime
• Chapter 1. Industrial Demolition and the Meaning of Economic Change in North America
• Chapter 2. “Take Only Pictures and Leave Only footprints”: Urban Exploration and the Aesthetics of Deindustrialization
• Chapter 3. From Cradle to Grave: The Politics of Memory in Youngstown, Ohio
• Part II: Oral History and Photography
• Chapter 4. Out of Place: The Plant Shutdown Stories of Sturgeon Falls (Ontario) Paperworkers
• Chapter 5. Gabriel’s Detroit
• Chapter 6. Deindustrial Fragments
• Chapter 7. King Coal: The Coal Counties of West Virginia
• Chapter 8. A Vanishing Landmark: Allied Paper in Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Bibliography
• Oral History Interviews Cited
• Notes
• Index