Picked Clean to the Bone

IN THE 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Donald Trump declared, “The American dream is dead.” The people of Lancaster, Ohio, a small town at the edge of Appalachia, heard him loud and clear and later gave him 60 percent of their votes. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town , by Lancaster native Brian Alexander, shows in fine-grained detail how the American dream of opportunity and fairness died in Lancaster and in similar towns all across the middle of the country.

Lancaster should have been the last place you would look for evidence of American decline. In 1947, a Forbes magazine cover story depicted it as “the All-American town.” It had a thriving manufacturing economy, a burgeoning middle-class, and enlightened civic leadership. For reasons of history and geography, Lancaster also had a reputation as “the whitest town in America,” but that didn’t bother Forbes too much back then.

The Lancaster of Alexander’s childhood and youth sounds a lot like Bedford Falls in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, but as the 20th century wore on, the town turned into Pottersville. When Alexander went back to write this book, he found that the glass factory where his father had worked was demolished. Most people had to drive an hour or more to Columbus for a job, civic life was deteriorating, and opioid addiction was rampant.

The main foundation of Lancaster’s All-American past was Anchor Hocking, a Fortune 500 glass manufacturer. According to Alexander, the industrialists who built Anchor Hocking in the early 20th century were real George Bailey types. Sure, they wanted to make a buck, but they were suckers for fuzzy-headed notions about the common good that led them to subsidize various public amenities for the town and cooperate with the unions that delivered a family wage to generations of Lancastrians. In those days, we learn, executives and managers might live on the same block with machine operators and share beers at the same local tavern.

The latter-day Potters who brought death to Alexander’s hometown were a succession of Wall Street raiders who, over a 30-year period, systematically stripped the town of its sustenance, its sense of community, and its pride. From Carl Icahn’s first move on Anchor Hocking in the “greed is good” ’80s to its current existence as a trinket on the chain of something called Monomoy Capital Partners, a series of high-finance buccaneers forced their way on board the company via massive stock purchases made with borrowed money. Then they used their voting power to make the company more profitable by turning its back on the community, screwing the workers, and selling off the company’s most valuable assets.

Perhaps the most “successful” of these grey-suited stick-up men was Stephen Feinberg, then head of Cerberus Capital Management, who ran Anchor Hocking into bankruptcy. If Feinberg’s name sounds familiar, it might be because he’s the billionaire buddy Donald Trump wanted to hire to assess the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies. (Carl Icahn, by the way, is Trump’s special adviser on regulations.)

Somehow, all these Wall Street pirates managed to load Anchor Hocking to the gills with debt. As Alexander explains it, they transferred the loans they themselves had taken out to buy the company onto the balance sheet of the company itself. By the end of Alexander’s story, Anchor Hocking exists mostly to pay interest on the loans that financed its degradation.

Glass House has the style and structure of a grand panoramic novel as Alexander follows a cast of characters located in every strata of Lancaster society. We’re in the corporate board room with Sam Solomon, the Monomoy-appointed CEO, who really wanted to “build value” in the company by making quality products and got fired after a year at the top. Alongside him is his corporate counsel, Erika Schoenberger, a minister’s daughter who believes that business can be a vehicle to serve the common good.

We also meet longtime union men, such as Dale Lamb, who headed the Anchor Hocking local when Wall Street first came calling, and Chris Nagle, who’s still there at the bitter end. Many of the factory workers depicted in Glass House followed fathers and uncles into the plant. One of these is Brian Gossett, a young part-time artist who had the misfortune to come along after the bones of Anchor Hocking were pretty thoroughly picked. There he worked in 130-degree temperatures for $14.55 an hour, for a company with an uncertain future, unaffordable health insurance, and no employer-matched retirement plan. In the end, Gossett takes a pay cut for a more secure job at Drew Shoe, an old manufacturing concern that now makes all its shoes in China but has kept its management and shipping jobs in Lancaster.

Over the course of the book, 26-year-old Gossett emerges as a sort of skate-punk sage. With family roots at least four generations deep in the town, he clearly sees Lancaster’s decline but is also fiercely loyal to it. He despises the owners and managers who let Anchor Hocking fall apart but also admits to taking pride in the work he did there. He’s equally scornful of “The System” and of his own generation’s addictions to drugs and smartphones. He despises Facebook and listens to NPR.

But meanwhile, out on the street, many of Gossett’s peers are falling into Donald Trump’s “American carnage.” In Glass House, we meet a young woman who injects heroin into her legs while crowing with pride on her Facebook page about seven days without a cigarette. She shares a house with a young man from a longtime Lancaster family who finds in heroin an answer to the “no-future” despair sweeping the town. Another young man, unemployable due to an old felony assault conviction, tries to build a stable family life on his career as a heroin distributor. That works pretty well until he and his girlfriend get busted with five ounces of dope in their car and three children in the back seat.

THE LIVES OF these damaged characters are quantified in the charts and graphs that illustrate economist Nicholas Eberstadt’s bookMen Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis and his February Commentary article “Our Miserable 21st Century.” Eberstadt, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has made quite a stir simply by crunching the numbers on unemployment and workforce participation from the past 50 years. He found that the unemployment rate, which counts only out-of-work job-seekers, has become a meaningless statistic. He focuses instead on workforce participation, and there he finds that the combined percentage of the unemployed, the underemployed, and those who are neither working nor looking for work is today at a level equivalent to some years of the Great Depression.

Particularly grim, he finds, are the numbers for men in their prime working years (25 to 54). For every man in that category who is officially unemployed, there are another three who are neither working nor actively looking for work. These “non-workers,” of course, include the genuinely disabled, the nation’s few stay-at-home dads, and perhaps a smattering of grad students or early retirees. But plenty of the nonworking are guys like some of Brian Alexander’s Lancastrians who simply grew “sick of scrambling around for minimum wages” and find a life on the jobless margins of society preferable to one slaving at McDonald’s or Wendy’s.

Of course, women have also been affected by the long-term decline of the U.S. economy. But Eberstadt finds that women without a paid job (and not looking for one) spend significantly more of their time caring for family members or performing other socially useful tasks while men without a paid job and not seeking one are more likely to just hang around staring at a screen. He also cites a 2016 study by economist Alan Krueger that found that “nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts— ... roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.” These men are less likely than either employed or actively job-seeking men to live in households with children or to participate in any sort of community activities. Denied the disciplines and rewards of productive labor by the United States’ wholesale deindustrialization, they seem, like the young junkies of Alexander’s Lancaster, to be simply adrift.

Much about Eberstadt’s research is revelatory, and dismaying. However, he also shows the peculiar myopia common to free market conservatives. For instance, he points to the robust rate of wealth creation in the contemporary U.S., but never notes that between 33 and 42 percent of that wealth is held by the top 1 percent of the population. He puts much of the blame for men’s withdrawal from the workforce on the availability of government aid, but never notes that wages for most working men have been in decline for almost 45 years.

We hear the voice of free market conservatives in Glass House, too. Alexander shows Lancaster’s political establishment as brainwashed by Fox News, blinded by pride of place, and incapable of acknowledging what’s happening to their town. They keep desperately throwing tax breaks at their Wall Street persecutors. At one point, they cut their public school budget and hand the money to one of Anchor Hocking’s absentee owners to head off a wave of layoffs. The company takes the money, and still lays off the workers. These local conservatives keep insisting that all the hollow-eyed junkies on their streets are “outsiders” who, for some inexplicable reason, have picked Lancaster as their haven.

Eric Brown, head of the local police major crimes unit, knows better. He chokes up as he tells Alexander about arresting the drug-addicted children of his high school classmates. Finally, the author asks Brown what happened to so radically change the town they both love.

“Corporate America is what happened,” the cop answers glumly.