Description
"In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio, the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass house, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown thirty-five years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion."--Jacket flap.
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Available
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Publication
New York : St. Martin's Press, 2017. 017
User reviews
LibraryThing member rivkat
So, financialization destroyed the American economy while convincing (white) Americans that the problem was liberal government and its handouts. Alexander traces the collapse of one town, Lancaster, Ohio, which used to have a lot of manufacturing including a huge glass factory. Lancaster was a
The rest traces the fate of the Anchor Hocking glass factory, from paternalistic employer whose executives lived in the town and felt responsibility for it to asset bought up by various “investors” (corporate raiders, S&Ls that collapsed in scandal, venture capital/private equity geniuses) whose short-term desire for profits led them to load it up with debt, merge it with other companies, fire lots of people, delay maintenance until things fell apart, charge it tens of millions of dollars in management fees, and then repeat the cycle all over again, weakening the company each time in ways that the people of the town couldn’t even understand. Management shorted contributions to the pension funds that workers had bargained for years ago, destroying their retirements. The jobs didn’t just disappear; they were destroyed, and destroying them made a small number of people a whole lot wealthier. The union made concessions and people took nominal, not just real, pay cuts, and still they kept losing jobs, even as the consultants and lawyers made hundreds of dollars an hour.
But none of these machinations were visible, though Alexander doesn’t really ever explain why that made “Obama” or “government” the scapegoat instead. As Alexander points out, “Whether because of the conservative small-government tide ushered in by Reagan, or because many internalized its diminished status and lost confidence in the future—any any willingness to invest in it—or both, Lancaster stopped spending on itself.” The schools deteriorated; streets and fire protection deteriorated; civic life deteriorated, including the rise of scandals of government mismanagement. To keep Anchor Hocking in town, the city took money from schools and gave it 100% tax abatements—then lost the jobs anyway. People with money liked Republicans; union and working-class people often didn’t vote and saw gay and transgender rights “as an attempt to impose an exotic order”; Alexander discusses one man who “leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.” Locals blamed the government for encouraging idleness and baby-having. At the same time, the town owed many of its remaining jobs to government: Medicaid and Medicare supplied 60% of the hospital’s income, and the hospital was the town’s biggest employer while the public schools came second and Anchor Hocking only third. Many blamed corruption and drugs on “a breakdown of old restirctions and codes,” “[a]n aversion to hard work,” but attributed those things to “the media” or liberalism, “not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.” People who had good jobs no longer involved themselves in the town, commuting elsewhere to work and focusing on their own concerns—in part because they were so busy working.
Racism flutters in around the edges, as with the slurs that Lancaster’s drug-buying whites used to describe their black and Latino connections. Confederate flags became more popular in the wake of Dylann Roof’s mass murder. “They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.” Lower-class whites felt screwed, and they thought, correctly, that somebody must be screwing them—they just didn’t figure out who. They liked Trump’s attack on Obamacare and his anti-Mexican immigrant stance.
The diagnosis is grim. Politicians who enabled deregulation and financialization have not suffered; the social contract has fractured and taken trust and the feeling of being part of something bigger with it. Alexander has no solutions, only a record of decline.
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decent deal if you were white, especially if you were Protestant; a white man could work hard and have a decent, though not lavish, life, and his wife could stay home and raise the kids while being involved in the community. Some of the story follows heroin addicts, mostly young, who may have come from middle-class families but see no future, and no reason to leave either. Longtime residents decided that these troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells were outsiders who’d come in to get free food and welfare, but really they were from longtime Lancaster families—they just didn’t have any belief in anything bigger or better.The rest traces the fate of the Anchor Hocking glass factory, from paternalistic employer whose executives lived in the town and felt responsibility for it to asset bought up by various “investors” (corporate raiders, S&Ls that collapsed in scandal, venture capital/private equity geniuses) whose short-term desire for profits led them to load it up with debt, merge it with other companies, fire lots of people, delay maintenance until things fell apart, charge it tens of millions of dollars in management fees, and then repeat the cycle all over again, weakening the company each time in ways that the people of the town couldn’t even understand. Management shorted contributions to the pension funds that workers had bargained for years ago, destroying their retirements. The jobs didn’t just disappear; they were destroyed, and destroying them made a small number of people a whole lot wealthier. The union made concessions and people took nominal, not just real, pay cuts, and still they kept losing jobs, even as the consultants and lawyers made hundreds of dollars an hour.
But none of these machinations were visible, though Alexander doesn’t really ever explain why that made “Obama” or “government” the scapegoat instead. As Alexander points out, “Whether because of the conservative small-government tide ushered in by Reagan, or because many internalized its diminished status and lost confidence in the future—any any willingness to invest in it—or both, Lancaster stopped spending on itself.” The schools deteriorated; streets and fire protection deteriorated; civic life deteriorated, including the rise of scandals of government mismanagement. To keep Anchor Hocking in town, the city took money from schools and gave it 100% tax abatements—then lost the jobs anyway. People with money liked Republicans; union and working-class people often didn’t vote and saw gay and transgender rights “as an attempt to impose an exotic order”; Alexander discusses one man who “leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.” Locals blamed the government for encouraging idleness and baby-having. At the same time, the town owed many of its remaining jobs to government: Medicaid and Medicare supplied 60% of the hospital’s income, and the hospital was the town’s biggest employer while the public schools came second and Anchor Hocking only third. Many blamed corruption and drugs on “a breakdown of old restirctions and codes,” “[a]n aversion to hard work,” but attributed those things to “the media” or liberalism, “not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.” People who had good jobs no longer involved themselves in the town, commuting elsewhere to work and focusing on their own concerns—in part because they were so busy working.
Racism flutters in around the edges, as with the slurs that Lancaster’s drug-buying whites used to describe their black and Latino connections. Confederate flags became more popular in the wake of Dylann Roof’s mass murder. “They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.” Lower-class whites felt screwed, and they thought, correctly, that somebody must be screwing them—they just didn’t figure out who. They liked Trump’s attack on Obamacare and his anti-Mexican immigrant stance.
The diagnosis is grim. Politicians who enabled deregulation and financialization have not suffered; the social contract has fractured and taken trust and the feeling of being part of something bigger with it. Alexander has no solutions, only a record of decline.
Show Less
LibraryThing member annbury
A pretty good read, although the George Packer book The Unwinding is better, I think. This book looks at the town of Lancaster, Ohio, and the Anchor Hocking Glass Company, over many years. There is nothing that one can do about this,
because life goes on and the people who screwed up this company
I spent 35 years on Wall Street, and one of my good friends recommended Newell, and another person that I worked with said that the strong dollar eliminated a lot of stupid capacity, among them Anchor Hocking, Fair;ly well written, although not as good as Packer. If I had not worked on. the Street and followed investment banks, I would have had a hard time following the ins and outs of private equity (LBOs), They certainly make their money the old fashioned way- they steal it.
because life goes on and the people who screwed up this company
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and its town would have happened anyway.I spent 35 years on Wall Street, and one of my good friends recommended Newell, and another person that I worked with said that the strong dollar eliminated a lot of stupid capacity, among them Anchor Hocking, Fair;ly well written, although not as good as Packer. If I had not worked on. the Street and followed investment banks, I would have had a hard time following the ins and outs of private equity (LBOs), They certainly make their money the old fashioned way- they steal it.
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LibraryThing member DLMorrese
The business of business is to make money. That's the basic premise of an economic theory advocated by the late Milton Friedman and embraced by politicians from Reagan to Trump. Investors entrust companies and corporations with money with the expectation of receiving even more money. Investor value
Glass House provides a case study of how the theory has worked for Lancaster, Ohio. It's a compelling account of the Anchor-Hocking glass company, once a major U.S. producer of glassware and the lifeblood of this small city. The company has generated a lot of wealth for investors over the last half century, but there has been a cost. This is the story of those who paid it.
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is therefor the primary concern of businesses. It's not about producing goods and services, at least not primarily. Those are simply a means for making money. It's certainly not about creating good-paying jobs. Employees are human resources to be used as needed and discarded when not, just like any other resource. An efficient business creates as much product as it can sell while employing as few people as possible, paying them only what it must. Anything beyond that cuts into profits that could otherwise be returned to investors. Generating more money at less cost makes a business efficient. It makes it successful. It increases its value and attractiveness for even more investment. It raises the price investors can get when they want to sell their shares. It's a fairly simple idea. Investors provide capital to fund businesses in which workers create wealth, and then the investors extract the wealth beyond that necessary to maintain the business. It's a great mechanism for making money, and somehow, through the magic of the invisible hand of free market capitalism, it brings prosperity to all. Or so the theory goes.Glass House provides a case study of how the theory has worked for Lancaster, Ohio. It's a compelling account of the Anchor-Hocking glass company, once a major U.S. producer of glassware and the lifeblood of this small city. The company has generated a lot of wealth for investors over the last half century, but there has been a cost. This is the story of those who paid it.
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LibraryThing member marshapetry
I'm gonna call this a "gems of a book because who knew a book about anchor hocking could be so interesting?!?! Highly recommend
LibraryThing member texasstorm
Many moments of excellence. but the detailed explanations of corporate activities were sometimes tedious. Still, the book is a great expanation of why the country is in the state it's in. I wish politicians would read this.
Subjects
Awards
Ohioana Book Award (Finalist — 2018)
Language
ISBN
1250085802 / 9781250085801