By Paul Akers
APOST-EARTH DAY revelation: We were better off when we had pollution.
I know pollution. Dirty water? The Kanawha River that flowed near my house was so tainted by chemical dumpings that no one fished in it but paupers and nothing swam in it but bony carp, which were less fish than Periodic Tables of Elements with fins.
Dirty air? "Welcome," a sign greeted visitors, "to South Charleston, Chemical Center of the World." Sometimes when a raindrop hit the back of your hand, you could see flecks of fly ash in it. A town-blanketing rotten-egg odor was "Carbide cologne," laundry that stayed too long on the line had to be re-washed, and paint jobs on cars not parked in garages prematurely peeled or turned colors that would dazzle Sherwin-Williams.
It was wonderful.
The all-but-dead brown river and the smoggy stench were the tangible signs of men working for good wages and moving their families forward. The environmental befoulments of their labor were like the perspiration of a steelworker or a miner or a chemical-tank cleaner: unpleasant in itself, but carrying the latent sweetness of the American Dream.
Almost every U.S. city had one or more nearby mills, factories, plants, foundries, shipyards, mines. These were work places that steadily brought prosperity--I define this as increasingly comfortable and largely debt-free living--to individuals, communities, a society. People joined in crews, "gangs," shifts, and whole companies to make things the world wanted. The makers took pride in their cooperative achievement. My dad's safety award for 20 years of accident-free truck driving at Union Carbide was like a soldier's medal, emblematic of a small but important contribution to a larger purpose.
THE FAMILY NAME
In that world, virtue wasn't just rewarded, it was mandatory. Some union featherbedding aside, there was no room for slackers, malcontents, sleepyheads--the various "problem children" whom every modern human-resources chief knows all too well. Moreover, many of these jobs were intergenerational: Your dad and granddad might have punched the same clock that purple-stamped your hours. To fall down on the job wasn't merely your own failing--it reflected on your family.
These places also fostered something we could use a whole lot more of today, human understanding--not some wispy ideal mouthed at commencement speeches, but the genuine article, clothed in gray dungarees.
My town, typical for its day, was governed by a soft apartheid. The handful of black students at each of the schools were liked well enough by their classmates, but outside the brick buildings there was virtually no mixing, except on the public basketball courts bordering "Colored Town." There was even less adult social interaction, and among whites of all ages the n-word, while not ubiquitous and rarely said with malice, was an acceptable descriptive.
Regarding racial matters, my dad was less anxious than my mom, who worried what the neighbors would think when Joe Willie, a black chum, came to the house to play drums in our pathetic basement "band." I attribute Dad's more liberal views to the many years he worked at "The Plant."
There, Dad heard black workers talk about their planned visits to relatives in the Deep South. These workers had to very carefully plot their trips around Jim Crow restrictions in accommodations while also steering clear of Klan types who wouldn't be above waylaying a strange black person. These injustices troubled my father. My mother, a homemaker, was good-hearted but lacked a similar communion with different types of people: Her social group was mostly her extended family and church friends.
The economic losses caused by America's de-industrialization are clear. Once, good men like my dad--who, though he suffered from lupus and diabetes and the damaging medicines used to ease their symptoms, and felt like hell practically all the time, toughed it out for 40 honest hours every week--could, with little formal education but with ferrous self-discipline, single-handedly put and keep their families in the middle class.
Now, the American working-class norm is two parents working, maybe at multiple jobs, maybe one of them the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven, just scratching by--while guardian angels rack up equally big work hours trying to keep the kids out of drugs, pregnancy, and jail.
DOWNWARD VECTOR
As Deborah Rudacille writes in USA Today about places like her hometown of Dundalk, Md., where Bethlehem Steel once employed 41,000 workers: "Over the past 30 years, [residents] have watched their jobs--and their prosperity and security--wither away, leaving them little more than beer, ciga-rettes, and lottery tickets at the corner store.
"Both [political] parties believed that the magic of free trade and open markets would create jobs for displaced workers, but laissez faire capitalism has failed. Communities such as Dundalk have fallen prey to the same ills afflicting inner cities--drugs, crime, and joblessness."
Less visible is another ill exacerbated by the exporting of our smokestack industries--the shredding of social comity. The modern scourges of incivility, political demonization, resistance to compromise, and so on have many sources, but one of them is the cubicle where millions of us sit manipulating electrons on a tube, each absorbed in his or her own personal task, as empty as an amputee's sleeve, rather than physically commingling with others in a mass setting for a felt common purpose.
In and around The Plant, my dad opened lunch pails with and unscrewed Thermos tops with people unlike him--Republicans, Swedish-Americans, Catholics, French Canadians, blacks, Cincinnati Reds fans. Such smelting of human types disposed earlier Americans to habits of moderation, self-examination, and empathy. A man might vote against Truman, wear a Rosary, even blaspheme that Vada Pinson was a better center fielder than Mickey Mantle. But you still saw him first as: a man.
It wasn't Utopia. It never is. But those big, heavy, dirty incubators of the working class fostered things precious on this Earth: upward mobility, family cohesion, community spirit, mutual respect, an unspoken brotherliness. If the price for this was a little hack-hack or sooty linens, it was worth paying. I'll take tartar sauce with my carp.
Paul Akers is editor of the Opinion pages of The Free Lance-Star.
