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Andrew Borowiec for The New York TimesThe demolition of the old Port Clinton Middle and Jefferson Elementary Schools in Port Clinton, Ohio.
My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.
But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers” in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America.
Growing up, almost all my classmates lived with two parents in homes their parents owned and in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else’s first name. Some dads worked in the local auto-part factories or gypsum mines, while others, like my dad, were small businessmen. In that era of strong unions and full employment, few families experienced joblessness or serious economic insecurity. Very few P.C.H.S. students came from wealthy backgrounds, and those few made every effort to hide that fact.
Half a century later, my classmates, now mostly retired, have experienced astonishing upward mobility. Nearly three-quarters of them surpassed their parents in education and in that way advanced economically as well. One-third of my classmates came from homes with parents who had not completed high school and, of that group, nearly half went to college.
Low costs at public and private colleges across Ohio were supplemented by locally raised scholarships — from the Rotary Club, the United Automobile Workers, the Junior Women’s Club and the like. Although the only two black students in my class encountered racial prejudice in town and none of their parents had finished grade school, both reached graduate school. Neither for them nor for our white classmates was family background the barrier to upward mobility that it would become in the next century.
Andrew Borowiec for The New York TimesMarie and Philip Berry are managers of Seed Faith Food Pantry in Port Clinton.Our (white) star quarterback, whom I will call J, grew up on the poor side of town. His dad, who had an eighth-grade education, worked two jobs to keep the family afloat — on the line at Port Clinton Manufacturing from 7 to 3, then at the canning factory from 3:30 to 11. Despite his 70-plus-hour workweek, J’s dad made it to J’s games. Unable to afford a car, J’s family hitched rides with neighbors to church every week and ate a lot of hash. Despite their modest background, J’s parents urged him to aim for college, and he chose the college-prep track at P.C.H.S., finishing in the top quarter of our class. His minister pointed him toward a downstate Lutheran institution and made a phone call to help find him financial aid. J graduated debt-free and continued on to seminary and a successful career as a Lutheran minister, coaching high school football on the side.
J’s rise from a well-knit but modest working-class family to a successful professional career was not atypical, as a recent survey of my classmates revealed. My classmates describe our youth in strikingly similar terms: “We were poor, but we didn’t know it.” In fact, however, in the breadth and depth of the social support we enjoyed, we were rich, but we didn’t know it.
As we graduated, none of us had any inkling that Port Clinton would change anytime soon. While almost half of us headed off to college, those who stayed in town had reason to expect a steady job (if they were male), marriage and a more comfortable life than their parents’.
But just beyond the horizon a national economic, social and cultural whirlwind was gathering force that would radically transform the life chances of the children and grandchildren of the graduates of the P.C.H.S. class of 1959. The change would be jaw dropping and heart wrenching, for Port Clinton turns out to be a poster child for changes that have engulfed America.
The manufacturing foundation of Port Clinton’s modest prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s began to tremble in the 1970s. The big Standard Products factory at the east end of town provided nearly 1,000 steady, good-paying blue-collar jobs in the 1950s, but the payroll was more than halved in the 1970s. After two more decades of layoffs and “give backs,” the plant gates on Maple Street finally closed in 1993, leaving a barbed-wire-encircled ruin now graced with Environmental Protection Agency warnings of toxicity. But that was merely the most visible symbol of the town’s economic implosion.
Manufacturing employment in Ottawa County plummeted from 55 percent of all jobs in 1965 to 25 percent in 1995 and kept falling. By 2012 the average worker in Ottawa County had not had a real raise for four decades and, in fact, is now paid roughly 16 percent less in inflation-adjusted dollars than his or her grandfather in the early 1970s. The local population fell as P.C.H.S. graduates who could escape increasingly did. Most of the downtown shops of my youth stand empty and derelict, driven out of business by gradually shrinking paychecks and the Walmart on the outskirts of town.
Andrew Borowiec for The New York TimesAn abandoned church in Port Clinton, Ohio.The social impact of those economic hammer blows was initially cushioned by the family and community bonds that had been so strong in my youth. But as successive graduating P.C.H.S. classes entered an ever worsening local economy, the social fabric of the 1950s and 1960s was gradually shredded. Juvenile-delinquency rates began to skyrocket in the 1980s and were triple the national average by 2010. Not surprisingly, given falling wages and loosening norms, single-parent households in Ottawa County doubled from 10 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 2010, while the divorce rate more than quadrupled. In Port Clinton itself, the epicenter of the local economic collapse in the 1980s, the rate of births out of wedlock quadrupled between 1978 and 1990, topping out at about 40 percent, nearly twice the race-adjusted national average (itself rising rapidly).
Unlike working-class kids in the class of 1959, many of their counterparts in Port Clinton today are, despite toil and talent, locked into troubled, even hopeless lives. R, an 18-year-old white woman, is almost the same age as my grandchildren. Her grandfather could have been one of my classmates. But when I went off to college on a scholarship from a local employer, he skipped college in favor of a well-paid, stable blue-collar job. Then the factories closed, and good, working-class jobs fled. So while my kids, and then my grandchildren, headed off to elite colleges and successful careers, his kids never found steady jobs, were seduced by drugs and crime, and burned through a string of impermanent relationships.
His granddaughter R tells a harrowing tale of loneliness, distrust and isolation. Her parents split up when she was in preschool and her mother left her alone and hungry for days. Her dad hooked up with a woman who hit R, refused to feed her and confined R to her room with baby gates. She says her only friend was a yellow mouse who lived in her apartment. Caught trafficking drugs in high school, R spent several months in a juvenile detention center and failed out of high school, finally eking out a diploma online. Her experiences left her with a deep-seated mistrust of anyone and everyone, embodied by the scars on her arms where a boyfriend injured her in the middle of the night. R wistfully recalls her stillborn baby, born when she was 14. Since breaking up with the baby’s dad, who left her for someone else, and with a second fiancé, who cheated on her after his release from prison, R is currently dating an older man with two infants born to different mothers — and, despite big dreams, she is not sure how much she should hope for.
R’S story is heartbreaking. But the story of Port Clinton over the last half-century — like the history of America over these decades — is not simply about the collapse of the working class but also about the birth of a new upper class. In the last two decades, just as the traditional economy of Port Clinton was collapsing, wealthy professionals from major cities in the Midwest have flocked to Port Clinton, building elaborate mansions in gated communities along Lake Erie and filling lagoons with their yachts. By 2011, the child poverty rate along the shore in upscale Catawba was only 1 percent, a fraction of the 51 percent rate only a few hundred yards inland. As the once thriving middle class disappeared, adjacent real estate listings in the Port Clinton News Herald advertised near-million-dollar mansions and dilapidated double-wides.
Andrew Borowiec for The New York TimesAn intersection in Port Clinton.The contrast with the egalitarian ethos and reality of the 1950s — the contrast between the upward mobility experienced by J and the bleak prospects of R — vividly captures Port Clinton’s transformation in the last half-century, much like that of the rest of the country. My research team has talked with dozens of R’s from Austin, Tex., to Duluth, Minn., and from Atlanta to Orange County, Calif.
The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.” Everyone in my parents’ generation thought of J as one of “our kids,” but surprisingly few adults in Port Clinton today are even aware of R’s existence, and even fewer would likely think of her as “our kid.” Until we treat the millions of R’s across America as our own kids, we will pay a major economic price, and talk of the American dream will increasingly seem cynical historical fiction.
America is a place of constant death and rebirth. Failure and triumph. It is remarkable however that if you look at the areas of america with the highest union membership in the 60's and 70's it is a nearly perfect overlay to today's most economically unviable communities. This is not a coincidence. The US is still the #1 manufacturing country in the world, ( or a close #2 depending on what criteria and currency you use.) the jobs have moved to places whereeople want to work hard and treat a good job as a privelage, not a birthright. Unions have done more harm to the American worker over time than any other force. Detroit is the story of public unions run amok with their continuous purchase of local politicians to protect their narrow minded vision of prosperity.
This wasp descendant of early pioneers - small town SoDakota boy - volunteer USMC 1951/53 - became an expatriate decades ago for professional reasons.
Faithfull reader of the NYT I have watched day by day - and with incredulity - the gradual decline of the american way of life - the lost wars - the lost peaces -
Happily I was able to retire in an old european county - much sneered at by such as the WSJ as "cheese eating surrender monkeys" -
In 40 years the USA has become another planet - unrecognisable -
My family for 3 generations were GOP - and yet I watched the american people tolerate 2 stolen elections by GWB - who - although an accelerator - was much more a symptom than a cause of this strange disintegration of what had been the hope of the post war world - How many dead young americans on his conscience ?
My children have had excellent and free education here - a virtually free health service which the WHO calls the world's best - yet they wouldn't think of living in a country founded and built by their forebears - they go there for inexpensive and rather exotic holidays - for professional activities - with their american pasports --
Yesterday I heard a returning african tourist express shock and amazed stories of homeless street people in San Francisco - once and american shangrilla -
History repeats - Greece and Rome - and the barbarians of the east gathering ----
Some of the laments of this article make no sense. If the low skilled jobs of that era paid so well, why was J's dad forced to work two of them ( a 70 hour week ) just to keep his family afloat? Why bemoan the loss of factories that were EPA health hazards? The simple fact is automation and global competition were inevitable and too think otherwise, is to be naive.
Nothing will break up a family quicker than economic strain.
The moral behavior of adults in the 50s was facilitated by secure living wage jobs.
I am a 66 year old American visiting Australia as I write this, and I am frequently struck by the impression that Australia is the America of my youth---egalitarian, with a strong middle class and an economy that allows women the luxury of NOT having to work outside the home if they have children, as so many of them do. It's like I have taken a time machine trip back to an America that, sadly, no longer exists. Well, folks, it does exist Down Under, proving that a modern, highly advanced society doesn't have to be riven by high inequality and unequal opportunities.
Tom from Honolulu
Labor lost. WalMart, Amazon, and others who mastered efficiencies of information technology during the same period when labor unions disappeared, have won. Remember when global competitiveness was going to be good for Americans who didn't need to make or do things any longer? That work in information economy would supplant those jobs? Well, Facebook, Apple, and Google didn't get the memo.
Where do you get the idea that unions caused the problem? People in many unionize states, like NY, CT, MA, still do a lot better than those in Mississippi and Alabama. Sure, unions were not able to save the jobs in Detroit, but that is in spite of unions. And if the unions would have been strong everywhere in the US, there might be better jobs everywhere.
Failure and triumph? But when the CEOs fail they get golden parachutes. On the other hand the Stella d'Oro workers in the Bronx worked hard and kept the company profitable. There reward was a buy-out by a private equity firm from Connecticut, followed by a lock-out, and then a move-out.
The game is rigged.
Unfortunately your logic is backwards. Unions were what was responsible for stable middle class jobs by fighting for and obtaining a 40 hour workweek, overtime pay, and family sustaining wages. The problems started with Reagan and were abetted by feckless Democrats like Bill Clinton who happily sold American workers down the river (see NAFTA).
You stated, "the jobs have moved to places whereeople want to work hard and treat a good job as a privelage, not a birthright." Are you serious? You actually think people in China want to work 60 plus hours for peanuts and live in crowded dormitories where rising suicides required nets strung around the buildings? You really have to get out of wherever you live and see reality.
The losers deserve at least some of the blame for their unfortunate circumstances. They voted for political candidates based on their prejudices rather than on their economic circumstances. What business did the most of the people of Janesville, WI have voting for a Republican tax cutter into Congress? In recent years, the GM factory closed and so did the Parker Pen Company. Did their vote have anything to do with gay marriage or rather their opposition to it? The chickens have come to roost. If they haven't been beaten up enough, let them re-elect Congressman Ryan in 2014. I am enjoying my dividend tax cuts and don't need foods stamps anyway.
I am not a baby boomer, but a Gen X-er. I grew up poor, but I'm now successful. I can tell you that in the course of my professional day I meet very few people my age or younger who actually grew up poor and was able to move up in the world. Actually... virtually no one. Every one works hard, to be sure, but most all have been placed where they are today by parents who got them into the right schools and the right careers, gave them quiet place to study and a stable place to call home. Otherwise... they just didn't make it.
I sometimes feel like I caught the last train out on the upward-mobility express.
Let me guess what corporate board you sit on. Without the unions, American workers would be working in the conditions of the early Industrial Revolution.
Mr. DeForest,
Rest assured that Mr. Putman's piece is NOT an accurate picture of Port Clinton, in my opinion. I, too, knew Rev. Harry Holzapfel very well having been a newspaper editor and photographer in Port Clinton from 1970-1980. The photography accompanying the article is an out-an-out hatchet job. (It showed the demolition of an old elementary school but not the modern elementary or junior high schools that opened in the city this past fall. It also showed a dilapidated church that hasn't been used in, perhaps, 20 years.) As a working journalist these past 43 years (newspapers and magazines), and as a Port Clinton resident since 1970, I can tell with all sincerity that Port Clinton, remains a very nice community. Yes, it could use some fixing up . . . but Mr. Putnam's rose-colored but devastatingly negative portrayal of Port Clinton reads like something out of Dickens rather than real commentary or real-world reporting.