BOOM, BUST, EXODUS

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. As this sociological study shows, that, at least, is what they tell the eggs.

Galesburg, Illinois, was once a town of steel, glass and rubber, devoted to meeting “America’s seemingly insatiable postwar appetite for appliances.” Newcomer workers received the less-than-desirable jobs, loading trucks and stuffing refrigerators with insulation and the like. “Appliance City,” as the enormous factory was called, had a population of 5,000 in its heyday, and it was something of a blue-collar paradise, its jobs paying $15-plus per hour with ample benefits. As Broughton (Public Policy/Univ. of Chicago) observes, in the late 1950s, Admiral, Maytag and other American manufacturers were producing 3 million refrigerators per year, along with washers and dryers. Half a century later, almost all that work had been outsourced, the good factory work moving to plants just across the border in Mexico, where a $15-per-hour job could be filled for $15 per day or less. As a result, the sleepy border town of Reynosa, Mexico, where Galesburg’s jobs went, has increased 1,000 percent in population, bringing all the usual crime and anomie. Broughton limns the story with interviews with those left behind and those newly hired, as well as the intermediaries who profit from others’ loss. One of them, central to the story, “saw himself as a warrior, fighting to take Rust Belt jobs and to stop China from stealing low-wage work from the maquilas.” That’s loyalty of a sort, one supposes. Sadder still is the author’s account of the cognitive dissonance that has settled like a shroud over both cities, as workers in Reynosa work 13-hour shifts and lose connections with their families and as the people of Galesburg try to convince themselves that things are for the better in a new world of flipping burgers and stocking shelves at the big-box store down the road.

Though somewhat academic and consistently grim, Broughton’s book provides ample documentation of a central truth of late-American history—namely, that capital has no country.