The old industrial heartland, that aching arc between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, is a landscape of desolation unmatched in American history outside the Dust Bowl and the post-Civil War South. But if the Dust Bowl produced John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, and if the Southern catastrophe inspired a vast literature of loss, the industrial Midwest has had too few writers and bards to chronicle its decline and sing its blues.
Which is reason enough to celebrate the publication of Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, written by Chicago author Edward McClelland and published by Bloomsbury Press. A bonus is that it’s a first-rate book, equal to its subject, which is a wrenching portrayal of the decades-long collapse of the Industrial Midwest into the Rust Belt, and the up-close stories of the people left in its wreckage.
An upfront disclosure: I know Ted McClelland and talked to him when he was reporting the book. He quotes respectfully from things I’ve written. Bloomsbury is my publisher and I’ve done a blurb for the book. So I may not be neutral. But McClelland’s subject – the Midwest – is my own turf. I want its pain and drama told right. If it wasn’t, I’d say so.
McClelland’s title is ironic. Back when the factories boomed and the mills roared, the sky over Midwestern cities was a carcinogenic soup of grit and smoke. But to the people who lived there, it smelled like bread on the table. Today, the same people look up and see “nothin’ but blue skies,” which smell like empty pockets and look like loss.
McClelland comes naturally by his story. He grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and his high school lay across the street from a giant Fisher Body plant, owned (like almost everything in Lansing) by General Motors. As McClelland writes, his boyhood smelled of paint. A band director at the high school developed a heart condition from years of breathing Oldsmobile paint through his open window.
For years, students at that high school, grads or not, just walked across the street, signed on at Fisher Body, and had good jobs for life. By the ‘80s, when McClelland got there, the American auto industry had entered its long, slow decline. Fisher wasn’t hiring. The plant lasted until 2005, then closed. There’s nothing there now but a demolition site overgrown with weeds and wildflowers: as McClelland writes, “deindustrialization has its own flora that grow on the grave of factories.” Nothing much is left except Gus’s, one of the bars that stood at every exit to the plant. Gus Caliacatsos, the owner, laid off 14 bartenders when the plant closed and now he himself is going back to Greece.
McClelland wonders how it happened so fast. He tells the story of Everett Ketchum, who took part in the epochal sit-down strike at GM in Flint in 1936-37, went on to earn $27 an hour as a tool-and-die maker in the ‘70s, spent 39 years at the plant and now, in his old age, lives comfortably on the good pension and health care benefits that GM no longer gives its younger workers.
McClelland writes:
“Everett went from northern Michigan farm boy to autoworker to prosperous pensioner. America went from agrarian society to foundry of the world to postindustrial nation. And Flint went from…….the city with the highest per capita income in the United States to a depopulated slum with the highest murder rate in the nation.
“How did all this happen, in the span of one man’s years?”
McClelland has other questions, too. He notes that America’s great invention “was not the airplane, or the atomic bomb, or the lunar lander. It was the middle class.” His book is filled with people who used to be middle class, but are no longer. So, he says, “we have to ask, was the American middle class just a moment?”
He seeks the answer in Detroit, which burned itself in 1967 and never recovered; in Cleveland, which “is as unromantic as a worn-out strip mall;” in poor Flint, which took both unionism and integration seriously but is left with nothing to show for it (he doesn’t have much good to say about Flint’s most famous recent citizen, filmmaker Michael Moore, whom he clearly considers a phony); in the old steel-making towns of western Pennsylvania: in Decatur, Illinois, filled with workers who never really recovered from the triple strike of 1994 against Firestone, Caterpillar and A.E. Staley, the British-owned sweetener maker.
In Syracuse, McClelland talks to workers left behind when Carrier Air-Conditioning left town – first for North Carolina and Georgia and, finally, to Singapore. He notes the irony that Syracuse invented the air-conditioning that made the South habitable: “it popularized the product that caused its own demise.” The two biggest industries in Syracuse now are education and medicine – teaching the young and preserving the old.
“When nothing is left for the middle-aged or the middle class,” McClelland writes, “it is difficult to be both.”
McClelland follows the legendary United Steelworkers leader Ed Sadlowski around the southeast side of Chicago, where nothing has replaced U.S. Steel’s South Works and the old Wisconsin Steel plant, both long closed.
Then he heads home to the north side of Chicago, the Lakeview neighborhood which is so full of young Midwesterners that each Big Ten university seems represented by a bar where its grads can watch their teams on Saturday afternoons. In an industrial Midwest filled with losers, this is where the winners gather.
Cleveland or Detroit will never imitate Chicago’s success, he writes. “There can be only one Midwestern metropolis. Chicago’s success is not only inimitable, it comes at the expense of every other city in the region,” inhaling not only the region’s energy and industry but its best young people.
“It’s another consequence of globalization, the same force destroying the middle class in Decatur,” he says. “Just as money and education have become concentrated among fewer people, they’ve become concentrated among fewer cities, too.”
Back in Detroit, McClelland rides around with a drug dealer with no chance of a job there and inadequate smarts to move to Chicago. “When you write about factories closing,” he says, “you can’t just write about the forty-year-old guys who lost their jobs: you also have to write about the twenty-year-olds who never got jobs.”
Finally, he ends up in Detroit’s old Packard plant, a surrealistic hulk, “a gallery of destruction,” improbably inhabited by scavengers and trolls as strange and isolated any lost tribe of the Amazon.
In the first chapter, McClelland asks, “What happened to the factory?” The rest of the book answers that question. For any Midwesterner who has asked the same question, Blue Skies is an essential read.
Recent travels have taken me to two places that would seem to have almost nothing in common – southeastern Iowa and England. Southeastern Iowa is centered on Ottumwa, an old manufacturing and mining town that is struggling to make its way in the post-industrial world. England, of course, is centered on London, which may be the glitziest, most dynamic city anywhere.
But I found in both places a growing resentment, even a fear. It’s a fear of a new, complicated, globalizing world that many people don’t understand and don’t much like. Basically, I think, it’s a feeling that they are losing control of their lives.
So they’re resisting. They’re saying no to globalization and to the leaders who celebrate this new world, with its falling barriers and new challenges. The leaders know where their cities and regions need to go, but increasingly find themselves stymied by this fear and the opposition it engenders.
This has consequences. Economic development leaders in southeastern Iowa know they need political support for the changes that declining region so badly needs. Government leaders and business people in England know that London, the quintessential global city, will continue to thrive only if it tends its myriad ties to the rest of the world.
But globalization is still seen by much of the world as a zero-sum game, with winners and losers.
The winners want to push on. The losers see they are losing control over their present and their future, over their ability to shape their lives, over their beliefs, over their choice of neighbors. Globalization challenges all this, and they’re angry.
Globalization is the future. To take part in its benefits, all of us – from smalltown Iowans to Little Englanders – have to come to terms with it. But if it’s going to work, those of us who see these benefits also must take these fears seriously. It’s not enough to say, “trust me.”
Right now, the trust isn’t there. In one way or another, distrust and fear are coalescing into a backlash.
Part of this is local. I saw this in southeastern Iowa when I spent time with economic development directors from surrounding counties. They know what’s needed – more regional cooperation, collaboration with neighboring towns and counties, immigration to counter falling populations, new and modern businesses, high schools that teach 21st-century skills.
All of them said they’re blocked by too many of their neighbors who feel that any change will rob them of control over their lives. Immigrants bring in new languages, new food, new music, new religion. Cooperating and collaboration with other towns and counties means compromise and a willingness to give up some of what they’ve got, to get more in the future. New businesses mean competition for existing businesses and higher wages to boot. Better high schools open new worlds that only encourage their sons and daughters to leave town.
So they dig in their heels and refuse to go along. If enough people refuse, then nothing happens. These are towns that already have lost many of their jobs and young people. If they don’t change, they’ll probably die, literally. So this is a life or death choice, and too many residents are choosing death. The way they see it, it’s better than losing control.
The same fear grips much of England (and other European countries, too) and is having a real political impact. London is more cosmopolitan than Britain these days and there’s an anti-immigration backlash among British who want their country to look the way it used to. People feel their beliefs are under challenge, that patriotism is under siege, that the grand experiment called the European Union is robbing Britain of control over its own affairs.
This explains much of the current drive to pull Britain out of the EU, a drive that will probably succeed, sooner or later. The campaign has coalesced around a new party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, which everyone calls Ukip. Ukip wants out of Europe and it also hotly opposes more immigration into England. Basically, it’s the British version of the Tea Party – or, for that matter, of Fidesz in Hungary, or the Dutch PVV, or the True Finns in Finland, or the other populist and nationalist parties rising around the world. All want to stop the world so they can get off.
Like the Tea Party, Ukip is both a fringe party and a political power in its own right. Latest polls give it 18 percent of the vote, in third place behind the Conservative and Labor Parties but well ahead of the Liberal Democrats, which belong to the governing coalition of Prime Minister David Cameron.
Mark Leonard, a prominent pro-EU British author, wrote recently:
In essence, support for Ukip, like other populist parties in the West, is a cry by an empowered majority afraid of losing its position as a result of the economic, demographic and cultural changes of globalization……The more that globalization forces countries to bind together, the more citizens crave their independence. After two decades of watching borders come down across the world, a growing group wants to see the walls re-erected. It is no coincidence that a backlash against interdependence is happening at the same moment as a backlash against the elites who drove globalization in the first place.
Leonard may be writing about England but his critique could apply to southeastern Iowa or many other areas of the world. Everywhere, the sweep of globalization has convinced people that they are losing control. Eventually, they fear, they will be left with nothing but their votes
Globalization is here, but it’s not reversible. Its proponents fear it could be derailed by a war or a recession, as an earlier spasm of globalization was derailed a century ago. More likely, it could be derailed by the votes of the people it is leaving behind.
If you live in Chicago, you’re probably familiar by now with the duststorm unleashed by Rachel Shteir, an expatriate New Yorker and heretofore obscure professor at the city’s DePaul University, who wrote a review of three Chicago-related books which led the New York Times Book Review on April 21. Actually, it wasn’t a review so much as an excuse for an essay by Shteir on the city and what‘s wrong with it. If you don’t live in Chicago, here’s a link to the review.
The first paragraph will give some of the flavor:
“Poor Chicago,” a friend of mine recently said. Given the number of urban apocalypses here, I couldn’t tell which problem she was referring to. Is it the Cubs never winning? The abominable weather? Meter parking costing more than anywhere else in America…with the money flowing to a private company, thanks to the ex-mayor Richard M. Daley’s shortsighted 2008 deal?……….”
After a lot of this, she ends, “Chicago is not Detroit, not yet.” But the city’s boosterism, which she says “has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago,” exists “because the reality is too painful to look at. Poor Chicago, indeed.”
This has brought a torrent of comment, pro and con, mostly con.("The Sound and the Fury in Chicago," "Not quite Detroit—Chicago as Described by a New York Times Book Critic," "Everything You Need to Know About Why Chicago Is Furious With Rachel Shteir and The New York Times.")
Most agree that the problems she cites, from the Cubs to the parking meter deal to the city’s segregation and inner-city murder rate, are valid enough, but can be culled from any morning newspaper. They also agree that the essay tells more about Shteir, a homesick New Yorker who has never bothered to learn much about Chicago, than it does about the city itself, which is both more dynamic and more troubled than she seems to understand.
Some critics reacted with a civic outrage that tended to validate her scorn of the city’s boosterism. A few told her to get out of town. Others listed or exaggerated the city’s virtues. Surprisingly, there’s been little discussion of what the city really is, where it fits into the 21st century world, how it compares with New York and other cities, and how it should regard itself.
Shteir’s right, that Chicago “is not Detroit, not yet.” And it never will be: suggesting otherwise simply reveals her ignorance of both cities. But nor is Chicago New York, not yet. And never will be. Outraged Chicago chauvinists who insist that Chicago is quieter and more livable, that Chicagoans are more polite, that Chicago is a cheaper place to live, miss the point as badly as did Shteir.
Let’s face it, New York is a Great City in a way that Chicago never was nor will be. It’s one of the capitals of the universe, a center of finance, fads, fashion and fascination up there with a handful of other Great Cities, such as London, Paris and Tokyo. Not that these are quiet or cheap places, polite or welcoming, or even pleasant places to be. Rather, they are truly where the action is, noisy and bumptious and busy, often too preoccupied with running the world to slow down for visitors from their hinterlands. They set the agenda and cultural standards of their countries. They’re often hard places to live. But they truly stand on the pinnacle of the global economy, of world scholarship and commerce, of civilization itself. Any city that presumes to be in their league has a lot to prove.
As most rankings of global cities confirm, Chicago is in the second tier, below the big four or five but in the top ten globally. That’s close enough to give us the illusion that, on our good days, we rank up there with New York. We don’t.
Chicago, in truth, is a first-rate provincial capital. That sounds like a put-down but it isn’t. Roy Jenkins, the British scholar/politician, once wrote a book called “Twelve Cities,” in which he called Chicago “simply the greatest non-capital city in the world.” (New York, he said, was a capital city “in all but the strictly political sense.”) These capital cities are different, mostly because they house governments and generate political clout, in a way that a non-capital city doesn‘t.
A list of provincial capitals or great non-capitals includes some of the world’s best cities. Jenkins said that Chicago has “a unique mixture of vigor and sophistication” that is rivaled, among other non-capital cities, only by Toronto on this continent or Barcelona in Europe. Other great non-capitals that come to mind include Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Munich, Osaka, Mumbai, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, Frankfurt, Rio de Janeiro, Zurich, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Montreal, Istanbul, Milan, and many more.
That’s quite a roster. Most, such as Shanghai and Frankfurt, are centers of business. Some, such as Milan, are centers of fashion or culture. A few, such as Istanbul or Sydney, outshine their capital cities and dominate their nations. But most, like Chicago, are centers of sub-national regions and radiate regionally but not nationally.
Chicago has no business comparing itself to New York, and both its boosters and its Shteirs look foolish when they try. Rather, it should recognize that it belongs to a rather glittering global Hanseatic league, and should learn from the cities with which it has so much in common.
All these cities didn’t let their lack of political clout keep them from climbing the global pole. They manage to fit into a world where this political clout is elsewhere. They often are multi-faceted and multi-layered, most complex than the capitals, which (like Washington) are often one-industry towns. Many have great universities, or boast orchestras or artistic climates that outshine their capitals.
Shteir’s little screed was a shoddy product, but if it ignites a civic debate on Chicago’s true place in the world, it might have served a purpose.
For any city aspiring to play in the global league, infrastructure is where it’s at. Such cities are out to court both the people and the businesses who can afford to live anywhere. These global citizens go to cities that not only have clean streets and good schools, but first-rate airports, good public transportation, space-age communications and green economies.
The question is how to pay for all this. Running a global city is expensive. Granted, the global citizens and corporations are willing to pay for what they get, so are seldom put off by higher rates and taxes or by user fees. But how do you woo these global high fliers with their deep pockets without pricing everybody else – the much-battered middle and working classes – out of the city?
This issue – urban financing – may be the number one civic issue of the future, an under-studied problem that is only now beginning to get the academic and political attention it deserves.
This is why a new experiment in Chicago merits study. It’s called the Chicago Infrastructure Trust and is a public-private partnership (or P3 for short) using private money to deliver public services, while keeping the ownership of these services in public hands. The magazine Next City recently had this good article on the Trust.
As Next City says, the Trust differs from old-style funding of civic projects through municipal bonds or relatively new-style funding through the sale or long-term leasing of public facilities. Rather, it asks private investors to pay for the projects in return for the profits – say, a share of public transit fees or the savings from an energy retrofit. The first project calls for retrofitting public buildings for energy efficiency to cut energy costs by 20 percent, and the city says investors will share in this saving. The public gets the benefit of a better train line or more efficient power station and, once the investors get their return, the public also gets the profits.
Dire circumstances drive this new approach. Chicago knows it’s unlikely to get much new money from a sequestered federal government or a deeply indebted state government. Its own city budget is in debt, and raising taxes or fees to pay for these projects could send the middle class residents fleeing for the suburbs.
The Trust started last year and only announced its first projects in March of this year, so it’s too early to judge its operation. In Chicago, enthusiasm is muted and skepticism is high, because of its most recent experience with P3.
That experience was the infamous parking meter deal, a misbegotten project rammed through an inattentive City Council by former Mayor Richard M. Daley which turned management of and profits from the city’s parking meters over to a private company for 75 years for a $1.16 billion payment up front. It turns out that the city should have been paid at least twice as much. In addition, meter rates have soared and, most egregiously, City Hall has to pay the company for lost income every time the city closes a street for, say, repairs or a street fair, which takes meters out of operation. The new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has been trying to get out of some or all of this contract -- so far without success.
An earlier P3 deal by Daley, which turned the Chicago Skyway over to a private company, seems more solid. But the parking meter deal has given privatization here a bad name. Emanuel’s administration promises it will do what Daley didn’t, which is to read the fine print, and to give not only the city government but the City Council, the Trust board and the city’s inspector general a chance to vet any project.
Chicagoans remain wary, but the Trust is moving forward. If it works, it could be a template for civic financing in the 21st century.
A Detroit business man with immensely deep pockets and an equally deep love for his town, has taken it upon himself to rebuild the blighted heart of that tragic city. Dan Gilbert is putting his money where his heart is, but his project, called Opportunity Detroit, raises both hope and questions.
Does a city without a vibrant center have a future? But is a vibrant center enough to revive a virtually moribund city? What is the relation between the business-dominated core of a city and the largely working class people outside it? More to the point, can even Dan Gilbert save Detroit?
Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, and his story was told in a two-page spread in the New York Times. Basically, it says he’s already pumped $1 billion into buying buildings and other real estate, has a light rail system and other projects in mind and is funding a host of start-ups through his own venture capital firm, all with an aim of bringing business, people and life to the two-square-mile area that is (or was) downtown Detroit.
There are several things to be said about this. First, he’s both fabulously wealthy and fabulously dedicated. This kind of well-heeled focus can make a difference, as we’re seeing in some other recovering cities, such as Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the philanthropic drive of the Van Andel and DeVos families have revived the center of an admittedly much smaller and less damaged city.
Second, city centers do count. Cities can exist with a blighted center: many, such as Cleveland, ticks along on the residual commerce from suburbs. But a truly vibrant city needs a vibrant center, a place where the best minds and biggest money from the urban area – and, increasingly, from around the globe – can come together to build the core of a future. Suburbs, for all their malls and lawns, have never filled this gap.
So good luck to Gilbert. If he succeeds in his two-square-mile project, he will have taken a first step toward bringing Detroit back from the dead.
But only the first step. Detroit needs more, much more. And if Gilbert has any idea where he goes from here, he’s not saying.
As everybody knows, there’s more to Detroit’s plight than an empty downtown. Its one big industry, car-making, has mostly gone away. Its official unemployment rate is over 18%: the unofficial rate is probably two to three times as high. Only one-fourth of the boys in its high schools graduate in four years.
Five to eight thousand homes are abandoned every year: the figure would be higher except the city continues to attract people – the poorest, least educated and most unskilled – because it’s such a cheap place to live.
The latest news from Detroit is the appointment by the state of an emergency manager to run the city. The city’s finances are so far out of control that its democratic-elected government has been stripped of much of its power: no other major American city has fallen so low.
But key to Gilbert’s challenge is the sheer size of the city – 138 square miles. This is big enough to have held 2 million people, which Detroit did in its heyday, and now holds only about one-third as many, 700,000. This means it is a medium-sized city stuck with bills for services for a city three times as large. Much of what’s left is crumbling, ill-served, dangerous, filled with people with no economic present or future. One of Detroit’s major problems is shrinking itself, by turning much of its area into parkland or farmland and concentrating the remainder of its population into an economically coherent space.
This vast challenge puts Gilbert’s two-square-mile project into context. Even if he succeeds in revitalizing the center, it will be no more than a well-groomed tail wagging an awfully skinny dog.
So should Gilbert just give up? Not at all. About thirty years ago, Chicago was nearing a Detroit-style collapse. Much of its heavy industry had gone. Residents were fleeing to the suburbs. Whole neighborhoods emptied out.
But Chicago worked hard to keep its downtown, the Loop, alive. Not that it was the glittering core that it is today. But at least it still held the big banks, the markets, some major stores, corporate headquarters. When the city began to revive in the late 1980s, it had a base for that revival. Much of Chicago’s growth since then has involved a steady expansion of the Loop-based prosperity.
First, the Loop revived, creating jobs. Then the people who held those jobs began to move back into the city. This led to stores to serve them and, in time, some decent schools for their children. The process is far from complete, and may never be. But the result, as unequal as it is, is better than Detroit.
Chicago, unlike Detroit, never was a one-industry town. Nor did it lose virtually all its white population, as has Detroit. Its crucial location as a transport hub remained, as did its major universities and other assets. It went down, but no so far as Detroit, and it didn’t have so far to climb back.
The Times mentioned some skeptics, mostly black leaders there, who fear that Gilbert will create “two Detroits, one for those who are downtown and one for those in the neighborhoods.” This is precisely what’s going to happen – in fact, must happen, at least in the short and medium term -- if Gilbert’s plans succeed.
Right now, Chicago is a city marked by inequality, between those who live in the Loop-based prosperous Chicago, and those, including much of its black population, that live beyond this fortunate core. Someday, all of Chicago may share in this vitality, but not yet. And it’s not going to happen quickly.
If Detroit revives, it will not revive all at once. The industry and jobs aren’t there. If Gilbert succeeds, the first result will be a prosperous core that will probably be mostly white, surrounded by a desperate city that is mostly black. Maybe, from this core, a more just city can grow. But the challenge, not least the racial politics, are daunting, to say the very least.
This week’s posting calls attention to two good stories from NPR on manufacturing in America, where it’s going and how this affects the Midwest. Both focus on Electrolux, the global corporation based in Sweden which has had an outside impact on industrial life in the Midwest.
Both stories are by a reporter named Andrea Hsu. The first, which is good news, more or less, tells about the opening of an Electrolux factory in Memphis, Tennessee. It will create a lot of jobs, 1,200 of them, most of them shifted from a plant near Montreal, in Canada. The job descriptions which Electrolux has posted on the web don’t give salaries, but Hsu says they’ll be about one-third less on average than the $19 per hour it’s been paying workers in Montreal.
Memphis and Tennessee offered Electrolux a package of $188 million in subsidies and incentives (also called bribes) to move to Memphis. That works out to about $156,000 per worker for each job created. That figure is about five times the average wage. In other words, Tennessee taxpayers have picked up the first five years of Electrolux’s payroll there.
You can read Hsu’s Memphis story here.
We’ve done some work on Electrolux elsewhere in the Midwest, where it’s been a presence for years. When I was researching my book, Caught in the Middle, I was in Greenville, Michigan, on the day that Electrolux closed the oldest and biggest plant in town, creating wounds that have yet to heal. This is what I wrote then.
Greenville offered Electrolux bribes of $74 million to stay, but it wasn’t enough. The 2,700 workers there made an average of $23 per hour, more than the workers in Montreal, about twice as much as the potential workers in Memphis, a whole lot more than the workers in Juarez, Mexico, which is where their jobs went.
Hsu also went to Webster City, Iowa, a blue-collar town north of Des Moines, where Electrolux was again the oldest and biggest employer in town, until it shut up shop and moved its 2,700 jobs, also to Juarez. Once again, those jobs paid $23 per hour – until they weren’t there anymore. Here’s what she wrote:
Greenville managed to land a solar panel factory, promising some 1,200 jobs, but Chinese competition and a dip in the market killed that factory. At least Greenville worked hard to find a future. Webster City still seems stunned, to judge by Hsu’s story. I’d spent some time in Webster City while Electrolux was still there, and again in 2009, after the Swedish company announced the closing. The plant actually shut two years ago, but Hsu reports that, despite a couple of false starts, it’s still looking for a future.
There’s no moral here, other than that we’re living in a global economy dominated by global corporations. Electrolux, like other businesses, exists to make profits and seek maximum efficiency. It has nothing against Greenville or Webster City or even Montreal, but it also has no ties to these places, unlike the locally-based corporations that once dominated Midwestern industry. If Memphis is smart, it will assume that Electrolux is just passing through and will be planning now for the day when it leaves town.
Spring is late coming to the Midwest this year, but democracy is blooming in Illinois. Most of the state is to hold township elections on April 9 to elect some of the most redundant and least useful public officials in American politics.
Personally, I could do with more tulips and fewer townships.
Townships are the dandelions on the lawn of democracy, hardy perennials with minimal purpose but impossible to kill off. They represent grassroots self-government run wild, 18th century expressions of Jeffersonian democracy with no purpose today except as havens for political time-servers who could disappear without anyone much noticing.
Of the fifty U.S. states, only twenty – eleven of them in the Midwest -- have the township form of government. In those states, townships function in some locales, not in others. Mostly, they exist in rural areas, although some live on in cities and suburbs that used to be rural. The functions they perform often duplicate functions performed by overlapping city or county governments. All have full-time employees, supported by taxpayers, virtually impossible to fire.
They do, however, come up for election. Not on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in November, when presidents and governors are elected. But in a special election which, in Illinois at least, falls on the second Tuesday of April. Hence the election in this state April 9.
Some details are necessary. Illinois has 1,432 townships, spread across 84 of its counties. The state actually has 102 counties, but 18 of them make do without townships, as does Chicago, which abolished townships within the city limits 111 years ago: government in Chicago may not meet the democratic ideal, but no one here suggests re-adopting townships as a cure.
(Townships proliferate equally in other Midwestern states. Indiana has 1,008 of them, Michigan 1,240, Ohio 1,309, and Minnesota no fewer than 1,784, even though they serve only 17 percent of Minnesota’s 5 million residents.)
If Chicago dumped townships, the rest of its county, Cook County, still has them. In this suburban remnant, like parts of the rest of the state, the elections on April 9 elections will fill a dizzying variety of offices, many of them overlapping.
(In fairness, this overlapping exists only in 11 of the 20 states with townships. Unfortunately, those 11 include eight Midwestern states – Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska and Ohio. Three of the other nine states – the Dakotas and Wisconsin – don’t have overlapping jurisdictions.) (See Population of Interest- Municipalities and Townships)
Since so little is at stake in the Illinois election, few people will vote and even fewer will note the outcomes. Like most citizens, I didn’t know this election was scheduled until a special section appeared in the Chicago Tribune, listing in small type the offices up for grabs.
The absurdity of townships is evident in the numbers. Remember, Illinois has 1,432 townships in 84 counties, which averages at 17 townships per county. Cook County itself has 30 townships, even without Chicago, which has 60 percent of the county’s population.
Each of these townships includes several towns and villages, all with their own functions, many of them duplicating the township functions. They also include park districts, school districts, library districts, community college districts, even fire protection districts.
For instance, Thornton Township, in the southern part of the county, includes 16 towns, 12 park districts, 11 library districts and 16 school districts: the few voters there who will go to the polls on April 9 will get to elect no fewer than 231 officers, many of them full-time employees.
A bit to the north, in the southwest part of the county, lies Lyons Township, which will elect 237 officers for 17 towns, 12 park districts, seven library districts and 15 school districts.
There are 28 other townships in Cook County, all with the similar election slates. You get the picture.
The towns themselves hold their election the same day and will elect their mayors, city clerk, city treasurer and other officials, all with jobs related to the towns. The townships will also elect supervisors, clerks, assessors, highway commissioners and the like, all with jobs related to the township, which includes the towns, where there are other people doing the same job. How many assessors and clerks do we need?
Defenders of townships point out that they are responsible for shoveling, maintaining and patching roads – 71,000 miles of them in Illinois, or 52 percent of the roads in the state. Maybe so, but one wonders what the other highway departments – state, county and city – are doing, and why this roadwork can’t be consolidated in one place, saving everybody some money.
Like a lot of American problems, this one has roots in the 18th century. Back in 1785, Congress passed the Land Ordinance, decreeing that the land north and west of the Ohio River be divided by surveyors into townships, which should be 36 square miles, six miles by six miles.
This was two years before the Northwest Ordinance which decreed where Midwestern states lines would be and provided for counties and for elections to govern them.
Unfortunately, neither ordinance said that voters in future years could decide whether any of these jurisdictions – states, counties or townships – have any relevance in later centuries. So the Midwest is still balkanized by state lines drawn before the states even existed, and the states are further split into counties and the counties are split into townships.
Once upon a time, this made sense. Roads were few or impassable and modern communications didn’t exist. Townships and counties were laid out to make it easy for settlers in those days to do official business in a reasonable time. Legend has it that counties themselves are so small because the elders of the day wanted to make sure that an unmarried couple in a horse-drawn buggy could get a marriage license in the county seat and get home by sundown, to prevent any twilight hanky-panky in the haystacks.
Today, this official business can be done online or, at a pinch, by phone. Any Midwesterner can drive across a county in a half hour or even walk across a township in an hour or two. Townships that once contained nothing by 36 square miles of prairie grass today embrace a half dozen towns, as in Cook County. If these exercises in mini-government ever had a purpose, it vanished a century or more ago.
Critics have railed against this nonsense for years without result. Getting rid of dandelions is easier than getting rid of townships. In Illinois, voters cannot just vote to dissolve their township. They also must get every other township in their county to agree in a referendum that requires signatures of 10 percent of voters in each township, just to get on the ballot. Clearly, this won’t happen.
Critics of big government are trying to chop state spending on education, health and other vital services. Perhaps some pruning of small government is a better place to start.
Not all illegal immigrants into the U.S. are Mexican and there’s more to immigration law reform than getting the Hispanic vote.
I learned this at a program in Chicago sponsored by an organization called Ireland Network Chicago, or IN-Chicago, where the fervor for reform matched that at any gathering in the city’s Mexican neighborhoods.
There are some 50,000 undocumented Irish in the United States, according to the best estimates, most in New York, Chicago and other major cities. There may be as many as 70,000 undocumented Poles in Chicago alone. Altogether, the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country include no less than 650,000 European citizens.
There are even more Asians, some 1.5 million persons from the Philippines, India, China, Vietnam and other Asian nations. All have a stake in the Congressional maneuvering going on now over a bill providing comprehensive immigration law reform, which would both give these immigrants legal status and provide a path to eventual citizenship.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs was asked to take part in this IN-Chicago program because of our recent task force report, “U.S. Economic Competitiveness at Risk,” which urged legal reforms to give legal status to workers, encourage foreign entrepreneurs, keep talented students here and provide a path to citizenship.
Like much of the immigration debate, this report focused largely on the millions of relatively unskilled Hispanic immigrants, many of whom risked their lives to cross the border, and the super-skilled academics and researchers who may get their education here but are then forced to leave, instead of putting that education to use here.
The others – the Europeans, Asians and Africans – mostly entered the U.S. legally, as students or tourists or on work visas, but they stayed when those visas ran out. Today, they live in the shadows in most major cities.
One of the two panelists at the IN-Chicago program was Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who is leading the Senate push for immigration law reform. Durbin, whose Illinois constituency includes many less-educated and often unemployed workers, stresses the need to make sure that immigrants don’t take jobs from Americans. But he’s also popular in the Irish community here and a supporter of legal status for undocumented Irish.
The other panelist was a well-known Chicago Irishman named Billy Lawless Sr., who left his native Galway 15 years ago, became a pub owner in the Wrigley Field neighborhood and now owns two of the best restaurants on Michigan Avenue. He quickly became a leader in the city’s Irish community, campaigning for undocumented Irish here, and then expanded that to a major role in the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which represents all undocumented immigrants.
As a restaurant owner, Lawless sees a lot of undocumented immigrants who show up looking for jobs. Many, he says, are under 40 and single. Lacking legal status, they can’t improve their education, open businesses or even look for better jobs.
Mostly, he says, they’re stuck here, afraid to go home to Ireland even for family emergencies because they know they’ll never be allowed to come back to the States.
So why not go home? Lawless says most of them, like the Mexican and other immigrants, came here to work, to look for better jobs than are available in Ireland. The Irish economy boomed spectacularly in the early part of the last decade, then crashed even more spectacularly when the recession hit. Thousands of young Irish citizens are leaving now, he said, but most are going to Canada and Australia, not the U.S.
Irish advocates here are pressing for an E-3 visa, which would give preference to thousands of would-be Irish immigrants. Currently, the U.S. gives these E-3 visas only to Australians, as a result of an act of Congress when the two nations signed a free-trade agreement. Ireland’s trading relations with the U.S. are governed by the European Union, but Irish here want this preference extended to their citizens.
There are a lot of votes hanging on the immigration law debate. The swing of Hispanic voters to the Democrats in last November’s presidential election has received the most attention: some pundits say that, unless the Republicans embrace comprehensive reform, this Hispanic vote will condemn them to permanent minority status nationally.
But Durbin pointed out that the second biggest bloc of solid Democratic voters, apart from African Americans, were Asian Americans, indicating the power of the immigration debate in that community. Hispanic-Americans, while solidly pro-Democratic, ranked third.
What seems to be happening is that the people of the world are on the move, but the laws lag behind. Thousands and millions of persons want to work in the United States: this country needs their skills and brains, but forces them to be here illegally, or not at all. Similarly, the U.S. needs to send more of its citizens into the world, but restrictive laws in other countries keep many of our best and brightest from learning about a globalizing world that will determine their future.
There has to be a better way.
Chicago and the Midwest may be tired of being called the “flyover territory,” but it’s true. Legions of Europeans and Asians who vacation in the United States call regularly at New York, Washington, San Francisco, especially Orlando, but seem unaware that Chicago and its vast inland empire even exist.
Chicago, at long last, is showing signs of doing something about this. It’s time for the rest of the Midwest to do the same.
Tourism is a trillion-dollar industry worldwide. It’s the world’s biggest service industry, generating some 30 percent of global service-sector exports. Every year, 62 million foreign tourists spend $116 billion here. Altogether, foreign and American tourists generate $759 billion in spending and create 14 million jobs, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
If you aren’t part of this bonanza, you’re missing a lot. Chicago and, to an even greater degree, the rest of the Midwest aren’t cashing in.
This has been a big issue in Chicago for some time. By some calculations, tourism already is the city’s #1 industry, but the overwhelming majority of these visitors are other Midwesterners. Not that we don’t like Iowans, but these folks come to Chicago anyway, to see a game or a show, and don’t have to be lured by ads.
Despite this, most of Chicago’s tourism promotion has been aimed at precisely these people. Until recently, the city’s tourism budget let it advertise within a 500-mile radius, from Omaha in the west to Pittsburgh in the east. Basically, we were just talking to ourselves.
The result is that, for most of the world’s travelers, Chicago is terra incognita. Ninety years after gangland guns stopped roaring, Chicago remains best known for Al Capone.
First-time visitors come to Chicago, gawk at the city’s architecture and lakefront and say, “Wow, what a surprise!” This is ridiculous. Nearly a century and a half after its big fire, Chicago should stop being a surprise to anyone.
No city is a global city these days unless it gets global tourists. Chicago, anxious to bolster its global status, is taking action.
The city has merged its tourism and convention bureaus into a new bureau called Choose Chicago and doubled its budget to $32.6 million. It has opened nine foreign offices. Its promotions appear in eight languages. It still spends $2 million every year luring tourists from Grand Rapids and St. Louis, but this new global spending will put its tourism promotion budget in the same league with New York ($40 million), if not with Las Vegas ($113.9 million) and Orlando ($49.8 million), which basically survive on tourism.
As the city’s traditional industries shrink, tourism helps fill the gap. If the old steel mills and meatpacking plants employed the immigrants of yesterday, hotels and restaurants employ today’s immigrants, often in low-level but steady jobs that give these immigrants and their families a toehold in the city’s economy.
But if Chicago is getting its tourism act together, what about the rest of the Midwest? What about the lakeside towns and resorts, the old river cities, the Victorian outposts, the state fairs, the fish-filled lakes and pheasant-filled fields, the scenic nooks (the Driftless area, Brown County, Minnesota’s North Shore, Little Egypt) that are as lovely as anything in New England but remain virtually unknown?
Obviously, these places don’t have $32 million to spend on advertising in Europe and China. So what can they do?
They can work together, that’s what. Right now, every Midwestern state has its own tourism program, geographically limited and aimed mostly at keeping potential tourists from going to neighboring states.
What about a Great Lakes campaign, marketing the Lakes as the geographical and scenic wonder that they are, luring tourists on the assumption that, if they visit one lakeside city or state, they might go on to others?
Some Great Lakes leaders such as Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett talk about branding the Lakes as America’s North Coast or New Coast or Third Coast, reminding foreign tourists that the Lakes’ 10,000 littoral miles dwarf the country’s Pacific and Atlantic coastlines.
The Driftless Area is a zone of rolling hills, winding streams and old towns centered on the upper Mississippi River and embracing parts of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. Its promotion is a natural four-state project that doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these states.
For that matter, five Midwestern states share the Mississippi River, perhaps the grandest and most storied river in the world. From Itasca to the St. Louis Arch, the river courses through scenic bluffs and old river towns. There’s even a river road, not much different from the road, much promoted in Germany, that winds along the Rhine.
Not so long along, the Whistling Straits golf course north of Milwaukee hosted a PGA tournament. For four days, Lake Michigan provided the backdrop to nationally-televised event. It was a perfect time for the four Lake Michigan states to plug the lake to tourists, much as Melbourne, Australia, puts itself on the global map with its Australian Open. But they blew it.
The Midwestern Governors Association should be banding together to promote the region. The MGA, however, is not known for collaboration, so perhaps other groups – the cities along the rivers and lakes, for instance – could reach across state lines to do their own promotion.
If Chicago’s campaign works, millions of foreign tourists may flock to the city. It would be a shame if they came and gawked, ate some pizza and watched the Cubs lose, and then got on the plane and flew home to Frankfurt or Osaka without discovering that, in the land beyond O’Hare, a whole new world awaits.
by Steve Brick, Senior Fellow, Energy and Climate, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
President Obama is coming to Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, on Friday, March 15, and he is expected to talk about energy policy. For more than four decades, we have heard US Presidents call for national energy policy, make grave declarations about the urgent need for change, and chart bold courses to effect that change. We have also, invariably, seen these bold plans founder on the shoals of political intransigence, economic short-termism, and public apathy.
Here are two suggestions for concrete things the President can do to encourage innovation, improve energy security, and take meaningful steps to reducing greenhouse gases.
1. Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline
President Obama should approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Opponents to the pipeline are disappointed by the lack of progress on international and national climate policies. For this group of dedicated activists, Keystone XL is a symbol of the battle to save the planet from runaway climate change. But every energy policy decision must balance competing objectives, and in this case, the balance tips in favor of the pipeline.
American public opinion also tips in favor of the pipeline. Quinnipiac, Gallup, and Fox News surveys have found about two in three Americans support the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, even when wording is included that points to potential environmental risks.
The US transportation sector still runs on oil, and will for the foreseeable future. Canada is our largest and most politically stable trading partner, and fostering that relationship is good for both countries. Construction jobs will be created as the 800-plus mile pipeline is built. Jobs in US refineries will be protected as volumes of Canadian oil increase.
Pipelines are the safest and most cost effective means of moving crude oil to refineries. At present, because of insufficient pipeline capacity, millions of barrels of Canadian oil are moving to US markets via rail, a mode of transportation at risk of derailment or spillage.
Denying the construction application would yield an environmental victory that is wholly symbolic; Canadian oil will continue to make its way to US markets, that oil will be refined and burned, and earth’s climate situation will not be one whit less perilous. We should not waste civic energy and political capital on purely symbolic fights; there are more tangible battles to be fought and won.
2. Leverage the Natural Gas Bonanza
A better use of civic energy and political capital would be to develop a national strategy for capitalizing on the current natural gas bonanza. Shale-gas has improved America’s energy picture. It has made natural gas more abundant and less costly. It has driven down carbon dioxide emission as natural gas displaces coal in the nation’s electric power plants. While Americans tend to favor the development of alternative energy sources, polls show that when asked specifically about natural gas, majorities support expanded exploration and offshore drilling (despite a dip in the wake of the Gulf oil spill). That said, a majority also supports stronger enforcement of federal environmental regulation (Gallup).
But, the revolution is proceeding with Schumpeterian destructiveness that could shorten its life and undermine its potential benefits. The revolution needs to be guided by careful policy support.
First, the nation needs a unified approach to the environmental review and permitting for new natural gas wells and associated infrastructure. The state-by-state patchwork that is currently evolving is not good for any concerned party, whether environmentalist or business. A Federal lead on this effort, with model regulations emanating from a carefully convened group of stakeholders, would help create an orderly, protective and transparent regime.
Second, we need to develop and deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for the natural gas-fired power plants. Department of Energy studies suggest that we can build a natural gas-fired power plant with CCS for less than the cost of a new coal-fired power plant. The world is not going to swear off fossil fuels anytime soon, and we urgently need technologies for managing fossil carbon emissions. While US coal consumption may be declining, global coal consumption is on the rise. Developing the CCS technology for natural gas power plants would pave the way for CCS on coal, and create a pathway for managing the growing coal-related emissions of China, India and other rapidly industrializing nations. The Federal government should develop and underwrite a 5-year program to bring this critical technology to maturity.
The Environmental Protection Agency is now considering regulations that would impose carbon dioxide standards on existing fossil power plants. Given the projected low cost of natural gas power plants, this is an ideal time to enact policies that would encourage turnover in the US power plant fleet. Such a policy should give power plant operators ample time to make smart retirement decisions and to plan for adding replacement capacity. In addition, the government and the states should consider whether temporary economic incentives are needed or appropriate to drive this shift. This policy would yield significant carbon reductions at modest cost, and represent meaningful progress on climate policy.
By taking these actions, the President can demonstrate his commitment to balancing energy economics, security and environmental concerns, and ease the country further through the energy transition that is both necessary and unavoidable.
Steve Brick, senior fellow on energy and climate, joined The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2009, providing broad experience having worked for thirty years at the intersection of energy and environmental policy. His previous positions include environment program manager for The Joyce Foundation, associate director of research for the Energy Center of Wisconsin, director of environmental affairs for PGE National Energy Group, science and policy director for the Clean Air Task Force, and cofounder and vice president of the energy consulting firm MSB Energy Associates. Mr. Brick received his B.A. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied at the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
For more information on energy in the Midwest, including Chicago Council Survey results on “American Views on Climate Change” and “American Views on Energy Policy,” visit The Chicago Council’s webpage on Energy and Midwest Economic Competitiveness and the blog Running Numbers, authored by Dina Smeltz, senior fellow on public opinion and foreign policy.