Alec MacGillis (ProPublica) provided a timely article in Bloomberg Businessweek: Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future? He recounts the efforts of
the workers at two coal-fired power plants to respond to the news that the
facilities had been scheduled to be shut down.
His story unfolds in the area of Adams County, Ohio, with emphasis on
the impact on the town of Mansfield.
Since the two plants provided most of the quality employment (union
wages and benefits) in the area, most of the workers would be unable to find
anything near equivalent as work. One
might expect most then to look elsewhere, but history tells us that many cling
desperately to any hope that they can remain in the region where they have
spread deep roots. MacGillis provides
this background.
“America was built on the idea
of picking yourself up and striking out for more promising territory. Ohio
itself was settled partly by early New Englanders who quit their rocky farms
for more tillable land to the west. Some of these population shifts helped
reshape the country: the 1930s migration from the Dust Bowl to California; the
Great Migration of blacks to the North and West, which occurred in phases
between 1910 and 1960; the Hillbilly Highway migration of Appalachian whites to
the industrial Midwest in the 1940s and ’50s.”
“In recent years, though,
Americans have grown less likely to migrate for opportunity. As recently as the
early 1990s, 3 percent of Americans moved across state lines each year, but
today the rate is half that. Fewer Americans moved in 2017 than in any year in
at least a half-century.”
MacGillis focuses on one particular individual who grew
up in the region and describes why he would prefer not to leave friends,
family, and church. He also points out
that those who had been transplants from other places who came for the decent
jobs the plants provided were the more likely to move on again. A convincing case is made that leaving is
difficult, but no conclusion was provided as to why moving might be more
difficult now than it was a few generations ago.
MacGillis did tell the tale of one couple who found good
work in Washington state. After about
six months they returned to Adams County after the husband found a job there.
“The position was nonunion and
paid only $22 per hour, half of what he was making in Washington state and also
much less than the $35 per hour he made at Killen Station [power plant]. He
took it anyway.”
Their decision was attributed to wanting to live what
they referred to as “the American dream,” which they defined thusly.
“The American dream is kind of
to stay close to your family, do well, and let your kids grow up around your
parents….”
That particular description of the American dream was
rather startling. It suggested that
there is something fundamentally different about people who believe that, and
perhaps it was important to delve into this issue further.
The ease with which the white working class turned to
Trump in the last election has generated a number of attempts to categorize
this class of people. Perhaps the most
perceptive is Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study of the residents of Louisiana: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Her focus was not on why people didn’t wish
to leave per se, but rather why their attachment to their home region was so
strong that they were willing to welcome industries that would provide the jobs
that would allow them to stay even though the industry would befoul the land
and render it barely habitable. Within
that context she brought up the concept of a “least resistant
personality.”
Back in 1984, California wanted to build a waste facility
that would provide a difficult environment for any living nearby. It would be noisy, smelly, generate a large
amount of traffic, lower property values, provide few jobs and would likely
produce unhealthy levels of pollution.
The thought was to learn how to convince any who might dwell in the
neighborhood that they would be enduring something that was worth the
discomfort. A study was commissioned to
Cerrell Associates, a consulting firm, that provided a completely different
perspective. The report was written by
J. Stephen Powell.
“The plant manager’s best course
of action, Powell concluded, would not be to try to change the minds of
residents predisposed to resist. It
would be to find a citizenry unlikely to resist.”
“Based on interviews and
questionnaires, Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the ‘least
resistant personality profile’:”
·
Longtime residents of the South or Midwest
·
High school educated only
·
Catholic
·
Uninvolved in social issues, and without a
culture of activism
·
Involved in mining, farming ranching (what
Cerrell called “nature exploitive occupations”)
·
Conservative
·
Republican
·
Advocates of the free market
These attributes applied to a great extent to the
Louisianans of Hochschild. They apply as
well to the people of Adams County as presented by MacGillis. The concept of a “least resistant
personality” is interesting in that it supports the fact that there truly are
different cultures in our country, encouraging the insensitive notion that
there is a left coast, a right coast, and a flyover area. It helps define the strength of the
attachment to home that develops within a class of people, but it does not
provide much insight into why that feeling is so strong.
Joan C. Williams scolds upper-class liberals about their
ignorance of working class whites in her recent book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Her lecturing becomes a bit irritating, and
she goes a bit overboard in promoting the virtues of the working class (and the
cluelessness of the elites).
Nevertheless, she provides some interesting insights.
“Middle
class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young
close to home. Tearing a working-class
person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than
insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley.”
“Non-privileged
people, whether poor or working class, tend to be more rooted than American
elites. Their lack of market power means
that they rely on close networks of family and friends for many things more
affluent folks purchase on the open market, from child and elder care to home
improvement projects. Moving would
eliminate this safety net….”
Then Williams makes a point
whose significance she might not have fully appreciated.
“At a
deeper level, non-privileged people invest much more of their identities in
their close-knit families and communities than do more privileged ones. Poor and working-class people derive social
honor from their reputations in communities of people who’ve known them
‘forever’.”
This concept of “social honor”
was identified by Hochschild as one of the strongest motivators in the
Louisianans she encountered. It also
provides a segue to a possible explanation why leaving a community can be so
difficult for this class of people.
Keith Payne provides an important perspective in his book
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die.
The inequality Payne refers to need not be associated with the standard
markers of income or professional attainment.
It is perhaps better understood as a status (social honor) deficit. Poor people who are comfortable with their
status within a community of peers can be quite satisfied. A millionaire who has to deal with
billionaires every day might be very cognizant of his/her lack of status and
actually consider themselves to be “poor” because of it.
“….inequality is not the same
thing as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it….Inequality makes
people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not. Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds
that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries,
has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a
superpower.”
The health and longevity problems that are associated
with poverty have been well documented.
What Payne is saying is that the same problems arise for people who are
not objectively poor, but who merely feel poor because they suffer a
status deficit. Payne invites his
readers to view status as rungs on a ladder and assign themselves a rung
appropriate to their perceived status.
“We have to take subjective
perceptions of status seriously, because they reveal so much about people’s
fates. If you place yourself on a lower
rung, then you are more likely in the coming years to suffer from depression,
anxiety, and chronic pain. The lower the
rung you select, the more probable it is that you will make bad decisions and
underperform at work. The lower the rung
you select, the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural and in
conspiracy theories. The lower the rung
you select, the more prone you are to weight issues, diabetes, and heart
problems. The lower the rung you select,
the fewer years you have left to live.”
The people of Adams County
followed by MacGillis are enmeshed in a community and have established a status
level for themselves. Were they to move
to a new place where a job might be easier to find, they would lose that status
and fall to a much lower state. They
might find themselves having to compete with those whom they had always
considered to be inferior to themselves for one reason or another. They might find themselves competing with a black
or a Hispanic for a job. Can they deal
with that? This sense of impending loss
of status could be why it is so difficult for people to uproot themselves.
Is this focus on status being
overly emphasized? Perhaps not. A number of studies have recently emerged claiming
that Trump picked up a lot of white votes, not because of any economic promises
he made, but because he told them he understood how precarious white advantage
(status/social honor) over others had become, and how he hinted he was going to
do something about it.
What then is different now from
a few generations ago when people were willing to pack up and move long
distances in search of work? A worker today
in Adams County moves to another location essentially as an individual with
perhaps a spouse and children. In the
eras MacGillis referred to earlier, the migrations were not those of
individuals. They were rivers of people
who left and sent back word of what they found, encouraging others to
follow. Preferred destinations were
identified where people more like those they had just left congregated and a
sense of community could be reestablished.
And with community, a sense of status could be quickly regained. It was a different era.
So, there is one possible answer
to MacGillis’s initial question—and that should be enough amateur sociology for
one day.
The interested reader might find
the following articles informative:
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