As I made my way out of class on Monday night, a few of my colleagues were kind enough to ask me about my book, “Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen”, which will be published by Continuum Books in the fall. Since there appears to be some interest, and since I am never above ego stroking or self-promotion, I have decided to post a brief excerpt. This relates strongly to the course as it uses Springsteen’s song “Youngstown” as a predicate to explore deindustrialization and the subsequent attempts of Midwestern towns to revitalize their struggling economies. (I’ve done some similar writing on John Mellencamp intended specifically for this blog–To be posted in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, please enjoy this excerpt from my book on Springsteen.)
From Chapter 5, “Down in Jungleland: The Politics of Urban Decay”
Closed factories have become a common eyesore along any American highway, and the exportation of blue collar manufacturing jobs has hit families hard. The misery is extended into unlikely fields. In 2002-03, at least 750,000 high tech jobs were shipped overseas. Businesses simply cannot resist the temptation to exploit the third world for cheap labor and leave Americans empty handed. There is no patriotic loyalty in a marketplace, only the bottom line. Americans, increasingly strapped for cash, respond as loyal consumers, not as citizens, and pour money into the hands of some of the worst outsourcer culprits, by shopping at Wal-Mart and other cheap retail megastores.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 90 percent of the jobs created in 2005 were in low wage fields. If prior to the recession, one analyzed the health of the job market by ignoring low wage, little benefit jobs; one would have drawn the conclusion that America had entered a job depression. Business Week did that very thing, and even before the financial crisis dubbed the United States a “health care economy,” because health care was the single field of employment with an expanding field of available jobs.
Systematic deindustrialization, which is the product of globalized trade agreements that benefit multi-national corporations that are able to exploit fatally poor people of the Third World, while stripping salaried jobs from First World workers, has caused many American cities to crumble in its wake. One illustrative example of this economic development is the Ohio steel-city, Youngstown. Since the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s, and later drops in revenue gained from auto plants, Youngstown has wallowed in economic malaise. The mid-sized city captures the fight for resuscitation and revival being waged throughout the Midwest Rust Belt, where rural communities have been maimed by the loss of family farming and smaller cities have suffered a tough blow from deindustrialization.
Springsteen identifies this ongoing struggle through the eyes of one worker in the city once famous for its steel production on his ballad, “Youngstown.” It was originally introduced to audiences on The Ghost of Tom Joad, as a guitar and fiddle folk ballad, which possessed an eerie musical quality and a quietly bereaved, half-whisper vocal delivery. Youngstown was the first stop for Springsteen on the tour conducted in support of his 1995 release. His next tour was backed by the E-Street band, and a completely remade “Youngstown” was featured prominently in each night’s set. The song had been transformed into an angry, hard rock classic, fueled by Springsteen’s hellfire howling vocals, the late Danny Federici’s cultural tip off accordion riff, and a closing guitar solo by Nils Lofgren that makes the hairs on anyone’s neck stand at attention. The bitterness, pain, and resentment of the folk version are amplified into outrage with the E-Street Band, and the worker’s final plea, “When I die I don’t wanna go to heaven. I would not do heaven’s work well. I pray the devil comes to take me to stand in the fiery furnaces of hell,” is entirely believable after being assaulted by this worker’s hellacious depiction of his town and life, which cannot possibly end with an ascension into a celestial paradise. The story begins happily and triumphantly with Youngstown heroically making the “cannon balls that helped the union win the war.”
The listener is transported ahead into the late 1960s, just prior to the city’s demise, in the second verse, when the son of a steelworker describes returning home from Vietnam and making a stable and secure living at the mill.
Well my daddy worked the furnaces
Kept ‘em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer
A job that’d suit the devil as well
Taconite, coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Then smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of god
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay
Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown
The comparison of smokestacks to the “arms of god” not only provides the song with powerful imagery, but gives one a sense of the unmatched importance of the steel industry to Youngstown life. It was a benevolent giver of jobs, livelihood, opportunity, and identity. It helped individuals maintain decent lives for their families, and established value and meaning for their larger community. Pride and purpose could be found in the assistance that Youngstown’s labor gave to American foreign policy. That is, until the foreign policy became confusing and ignoble, and the American steel industry folded. The worker recalls his father, no doubt at this point an elderly man, expressing scarred bewilderment over how the world’s evilest men could not destroy Youngstown, but wealthy American elites with their own agenda could.
Well my daddy come on the Ohio works
When he come home from world war two
Now the yards just scrap and rubble
He said, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for
The original version of the song is the lament of a defeated man who is at the end of his rope, and seems to be telling his story reluctantly, while the E-Street rendition functions as a violent confrontation between worker and structural authority. Those in its path are blown over by an enraged victim of cruelly misplaced American economic priorities, who is prepared to extract accountability from the corporate traitors, and their enablers in politics, who denied him his prideful livelihood and robbed his city of its identity, value, and purpose. The three guitar pileup riff, accented by a folksy accordion, sounds like the harsh hum of manufacturing, and Springsteen’s voice resembles a prophet screaming knee deep in a lake of fire. When condemnation of economic exploiters, political pirates, and a system that encourages them is issued, one is forced, spine thoroughly chilled, to morally and existentially reflect on the often ignored victimization process playing out in far too many American homes and cities.
From the Monongaleh valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalacchia
The story’s always the same
Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name
And Youngstown
And Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown
All that remains is that haunting prayer for hellfire, which will bring the worker back to the heat of the mill, and allow him to hold on to his hostility, rage, and violent instinct.
Some Rust Belt cities, not willing to descend into hell, have attempted revitalization—Youngstown among them. However, many of them have been unable to find tenable alternatives to steel, and have thus far had difficulty in getting ahead. Joliet, Illinois and Gary, Indiana have relied on vice distribution in the form of riverboat casinos to stay afloat. City leaders and rational residents have no rightful reason to morally oppose gambling, but most of them realize that while it may not destroy the moral fabric of city life, as some Puritanical critics believe, it certainly does not uplift it. Therefore, they hope that the rewards will be greater than the costs by manifesting themselves in increased jobs and entrepreneurship surrounding the casino. The economically beneficial effect of gambling on small to mid-sized, formerly manufacturing-driven cities has either been inconsistent or felt only at the margins.
Watch and Listen to “Youngstown”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s8B8FvfFRA
For those who want more of the book, you’ll just have to buy it when it comes out. Like I said, above shameless self-promotion, I am not.
David Masciotra