Shattered dreams on The Rust Belt
CAST your mind back to the last US Presidential election at the tail end of 2016 and you might well remember the constant references to The Rust Belt. This was, and remains, the term used to describe the collective of Mid West States around the Great Lakes area of the USA, states that include Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Analysts reckon that victories in all of these for Trump would pave his way to the White House. And indeed he did win them all, some of whom had not voted Republican since the early 1980s in the time of Ronald Reagan. This was, one time, the great heartland of the mighty American industrial machine.
A world of steelworks and coal and high employment. Security and jobs for life. But these industries dried up and died towards the end of the 20th century, leaving the area suffering massive economic decline, urban decay and the disappearance of a way of life for hundreds of thousands of working-class blue collar workers. Hence the term Rust. Industry was lost. Trump’s promise to these folk was to bring industry back, an on-going project, no doubt.
If you have ever watched that 1970s classic, The Deer Hunter, and particularly the first hour of the movie, you’ll know exactly the world and the lifestyle I refer to. The enormous steelworks that dominated and supported whole towns.
Allentown, Easton and Bethlehem are a triplet of neighbouring mid-size towns in north-eastern Pennsylvania that were hit really hard by the closures and decline. Whole ways of life were wiped out (similar to so many parts of the UK that were decimated by the coal mine closures during Thatcherism). On a recent trip to Pennsylvania I visited the now rusting steelworks along the Lehigh river in the town of Bethlehem, a factory that one time generated 20,000 jobs in the area.
I was absolutely stunned by the enormity of the site! The factory itself was a quarter of a mile long, with it’s own link to the railroads that would have one time supplied steel east and west, to drive and construct the great American dream. Steel used to build the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Empire State Building in New York, (they say the steel was still hot arriving on the freight trains to New York, such was the need and demand!) But times change, and empires flourish and diminish. Now all is quiet and empty. The lyrics to Billy Joel’s song ‘Allentown’ capture this collapse so accurately.
Well we’re living here in Allentown, and they’re closing all the factories down Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time, filling out forms, standing in line.
And we’re waiting here in Allentown, for the Pennsylvania we never found, for the promises our teachers gave, if we worked hard, if we behaved.
So the graduations hang on the wall but they never really helped us at all
No, they never thought us what was real Iron, coke, chromium steel.
Joel, pictured, simply calls it as it is. A promise of a way of life, a future, a way to be, something to be, all shattered. The steam no longer rises from the cooling systems, no smoke from the furnaces, no flying sparks, no hooter at the end of a shift, no shunting cars in and out. Dereliction and silence. And streets upon streets of run-down homes housing the unemployed. They’re not making movies about this part of America anymore. For the land of opportunity where millions of cold and hungry fled to, perhaps time is running out? The system is failing. And maybe not just in America.
So I’m living here in Allentown, and though it’s hard to keep a good man down, No I won’t be getting up today,
... and it’s getting very hard to stay. John J Kelly is a multiple award-winning poet from Enniscorthy. He is the founder of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award with the Wexford Literary Festival and co-ordinator of poetry workshops for schools locally. Each week, John’s column will deal mainly with novels, plays and poems from both the Leaving Certificate syllabus and Junior Certificate syllabus.