Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of
Globalization
By Richard C. Longworth
Bloomsbury, 320 pages,
$25.95
Reading Richard C. Longworth's riveting new book, "Caught in the
Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalization," immediately got me
thinking about my childhood growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. More
specifically, the book brought back memories of my years at William H. Prescott
Elementary School on Wrightwood and Ashland Avenues, particularly of
kindergarten and of the day I graduated from 8th grade.
The author's many
discussions regarding the stranglehold of manufacturing on the Midwest made me
recall that all we really did in 10 long months of kindergarten at Prescott, a
public school catering exclusively to kids of blue-collar parents, was learn how
to tell time, spending hours on the task each and every day. And at our
8th-grade graduation, I still recall, the key honoree was not the kid who had
compiled the best academic record, or even the toadie who had rung up the best
record of service, but the student who had the best attendance record over the
years.
With the Midwest in crisis these days, a result in large part of
globalization, my Prescott memories are instructive and fully consistent with
Longworth's thesis, for the school's emphasis on industrial discipline -- that
is, on the clock, on reliability and on punctuality -- supported and reinforced
the heavy-manufacturing regime that over the first half of the 20th Century made
the Midwest one of the economic powerhouses of the world. Get used to life on
the assembly line, kids, trade your freedom and your dreams for union wages and
good "benes."
It will come as no surprise to anyone who hasn't been in a
coma over the past few decades that industrial discipline is no longer enough to
make the region tick. Unfortunately, though, the Midwest, enthralled to and with
manufacturing for generations, isn't adjusting too well to economic change,
suffering, as it does, from what Longworth calls an "industrial hangover" that
just won't go away.
It's not hard to understand why that hangover
lingers, given the intoxicating growth heavy manufacturing, along with
agriculture, made possible in the Midwest for well over a century. As Longworth
points out in vivid detail, the region, much of which seems so rusty and
shopworn today, was, from about 1850 to 1950, the humming engine of America, the
center of American innovation, the Silicon Valley of its day.
Indeed, the
Midwest, often dismissed as flyover territory by the coastal jet set today, was
not only the world's manufacturing dynamo but also the most dynamic agricultural
zone in the world during its heyday. The agro-industrial complex created in the
region constituted a one-two combination few other areas could rival, and
Midwesterners, now seen as conservative and risk-averse, were busy inventing new
products, creating new industries and making the diversified family farm a model
of agricultural efficiency. But that was yesterday.
Beginning in the
1970s, or even earlier, the industrial economy of the Midwest began a decline,
which turned into free-fall during the globalization wave of the past two
decades. Why? For many reasons, according to Longworth: the integration of world
markets and increased global competition; managerial failures; high costs
associated with unionized industries; declining innovativeness; and a business
climate marked increasingly by entrepreneurial lethargy.
At the same
time, the other pillar upon which the Midwest was built, the heavily
commercialized family farm, began to collapse as well, leading to a rural crisis
of quasi-biblical proportions. This crisis was caused by some of the same
factors that brought down heavy industry in the Midwest, most notably increased
global competition. Such competition wreaked havoc throughout the Farm Belt,
leading over time to a massive weeding out of the agricultural sector,
bankrupting many smaller, less-efficient farmers and consolidating farm
ownership and farm income more and more into the hands of a small agribusiness
elite.
Thus the Midwest has been affected by a double whammy over the
past few decades, as the tides of globalization pounded the region's
agro-industrial complex, the platform upon which the region was
made.
Ironically, then, the economic relationship responsible in large
part for the Midwest's will to power during its golden age -- the close
interaction between town and country, between factory and field -- now
exacerbated and intensified the region's economic decline, for the region had
bet the farm, as it were, on belching smokestacks and bleating livestock for a
long time. Whatever technical terminology one wishes to invoke in explaining the
Midwest's predicament -- lock-in mechanisms, path dependency, the winner's
curse, for example -- it's all the same to the millions of Midwesterners who
have lost their jobs or their farms, have seen their communities sundered and
have had their hopes dashed, their futures seemingly taken away.
"In
Caught in the Middle," Longworth, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs and distinguished journalist who spent many years with the
Tribune, provides a superb analysis of the crisis in the Midwest and sober
advice on how to alleviate, if not eliminate, the region's pain. Moreover, he
captures the flavor of the Midwest today, the nuevo Midwest -- replete with
immigrants, urban/suburban/rural ghettos, hollowed-out cities, abandoned small
towns, failing schools and feckless politicians. But it is still breathing and
not without assets -- rich farmland, a plethora of fresh water, agricultural and
industrial expertise and excellent research universities -- and a few success
stories, a reborn Chicago, most notably.
Such assets and successes might,
according to the author, form the basis for a strategy of economic renewal for
the region as a whole, one based perhaps on bioscience and biotechnology. But in
order for such a strategy to work, the region will have to change in fundamental
ways.
First, those in the region must learn to work together. Longworth's
Midwest -- defined not by state lines but by history, economic structure and
states of mind -- runs across that swath of America's midsection from
east-central Ohio to the eastern slivers of Kansas and Nebraska, but without the
southern thirds of Ohio and Illinois, the southern halves of Indiana and
Missouri, the rest of Kansas and Nebraska, and the Dakotas, all of which,
according to Longworth, belong more properly to other regions, either the South,
the Ozarks, or the Great Plains. His Midwest rose and fell as a unit, and it
will come back, if it does, only with a unified development strategy. Indeed,
Longworth's most important point about how to stanch the bleeding in the region
is to get the Midwest and Midwesterners to think and act regionally, which in
his view would not only be more efficient by reducing redundancies and tamping
down internecine competition but also more effective by establishing the area as
a discrete and readily recognizable geographic entity.
Second, the
Midwest and Midwesterners must shake off the cobwebs and begin to innovate, take
some risks and begin the process of economic reinvention, whether in biotech or
some other new, new thing.
Third, the Midwest and Midwesterners must be
realistic: The golden age is over and is never coming back. But with hard work,
smart policy and good luck, the region at least has a fighting chance for a
future, and "Caught in the Middle" provides a brilliant battle
plan.
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Peter A. Coclanis is associate provost for
international affairs and Albert R. Newsome professor of history at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
