Early this morning I couldn’t sleep, so I drove out to Gillie’s Coney Island just north of Flint to finish reading Edward McClelland’s engrossing book Nothin’ but Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland. Although Blue Skies is nothing less than a full-blown survey of Rust Belt decline — from Buffalo to Decatur — the penultimate chapter dealt specifically with the end stages of Flint’s decay, and particularly the spike in crime as a result of public safety cuts.
After I finished reading, I drove home, and the predawn twilight was illuminated by a massive fire that had consumed a huge old house on the Eastside. The flames reached higher than the house’s three stories and I could smell the soot on the interstate a half-mile away. It was a striking and depressing reminder that, far from exaggerating Midwestern distress, books like McClelland’s attempt to proportionally consider the dimensions of the human disaster here.
Cities like Flint, Detroit, Cleveland, and Homestead have been scrutinized in a recent series of memoirs and analyses — Gordon Young’s Teardown, Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy, and Nothin’ but Blue Skies, among many others. As America’s industrial decline has evolved into its post-industrial catastrophe, we are very fortunate to have received these candid, sharp, nuanced accounts of communities stripped of resource and divested of political power. It is a mortally important subject, as it hints toward the fate of much of America, and whatever their individual wrinkles may be, I consider these books to be a gift.
Nothin’ but Blue Skies specifically may be one of the most rhetorically strident of these, just as its subject is the most encompassing. Each of sixteen chapters is framed around a different city’s moment of industrial reckoning. As some cities have faced multiple reckonings they are given multiple chapters, and within each chapter the argument moves swiftly from manufacturing practice to demolition costs to integrative busing to racial politics. The language itself is direct but poetic, and so on the opening page McClelland declares: “I ran laps around the stadium’s four-hundred-meter oval, inhaling atomized paint fumes with every gasp — a sweetish metallic tang I still associate with the track team.”
The effect of all of this detail and history and imagery is occasionally dizzying; I described the book as an “argument,” and it certainly is, for there is plenty of opinion (and a fair amount of speculation) in McClelland’s study. And yet there is no easy way to soundbite this argument into something more trite or concise than the movement of historical forces, laws of unintended consequences, and perhaps the value of small victories. If anything, reading Nothin’ but Blue Skies is a little like an informal but informed conversation with an acquaintance or a friend-of-a-friend: you might not agree with everything McClelland says, but his vision is utterly absorbing, and you certainly come away feeling the significance — local, national, and global — of this moment for Amercia’s industrial heartland.
Where will our economy be in a generation?
What will our social legacy be a hundred years from now?
Perhaps the answers are being decided not on the trading floors of Wall Street or the chambers of Washington, but on a neglected patch of Detroit described only as “the corner of Palmer and Jesus Saves.”
There is one defect to McClelland’s work, and I found it to be a troublesome one. Although he has meticulously researched this work, he does not prefer precision to rhetorical energy. This leads to frequent statements that I believe readers are meant to parse carefully and with some skepticism. So, for example, when discussing Lackawanna, New York, McClelland states that its sizable Muslim population celebrated the bombing of the USS Cole “as righteous revenge on an American warship violating Arab waters,” he doesn’t, I think, mean that most Arab-Americans involved in the “Yemenite Benevolent Association, the Lackawanna Halal Market, and the Lackawanna Islamic Center” are doing just that (celebrating), but that the historical legacies and present poverty of that town bred the radical sentiments that gave rise to the Lackawanna Six (also discussed here).
It’s a critical distinction, and one that, misapplied, could be made to serve a sort of cultural hegemony, even though elsewhere the book explicitly argues the opposite. Yet this is one small paragraph, and most chapters feature several such contradictory juxtapositions. Complex interactions are described as simple things, and the intentions of politicians and parishioners are often boiled down to a cynical or prejudiced tagline. In short, this is a book for discerning readers only. Ponder it. Argue with it. Don’t be afraid to disagree. There will be times when you ought to disagree.
But I don’t want this shortcoming to keep Blue Skies from a wide and serious readership. Deindustrialization has taken going-on two generations now. It isn’t as fit for the 24-hour news cycle as a bomb or a hurricane, but this is just as critical a process for a region’s survival and our nation’s identity. Edward McClelland has put his finger on the pulse of the Rust Belt and has explained it both seriously and memorably.