The Great Collapse-Chapter Two

The Great Collapse

Chapter Two

By Rod Kackley

Author's note: This is an excerpt from the second chapter of The Great Collapse, the first in a five-part ebook essay series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance.


If there remains any doubt as to the level of despair and decay in what was the wheelhouse of Michigan’s economy, all you have to do is view the photography of Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled exhibition.

These pictures are worth a thousand tears. To be faced with the collapse of the city that was the poster municipality for the industrialized twentieth century is like seeing the NFL hero of one’s youth hobbled by age after taking too many hits to the head and too many punches to the spleen.

 It was very much like watching my mother, turned into someone I barely recognized by Alzheimer’s disease, on the last day of her life. My father and I held each other wondering aloud if it would be more humane to rest a soft pillow over her face. We didn’t. Before long we didn’t have too.

Detroit was so broken it couldn’t even afford the cost of the soft pillow. There was no money to tear down the buildings that were being consumed by Mother Nature and her animals that had returned to the abandoned city.

It is not just the Motor City that has been knocked flat by the clothesline of the Great Recession and the decimation of  twentieth-century industrialization. The home of the Detroit Three—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—was not alone.

The middle class—created by the rise of manufacturing—was crushed by the collapse of manufacturing in Michigan. 

A Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings study released in June 2011 showed “between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs, amounting to nearly one-third of its manufacturing employment.” That is 5 million families, living in 5 million homes, the backbone of the middle class in the U.S. who, at least for a short time, didn’t know where their next paychecks would be coming from.

Millions of them still don’t have paychecks. They have lost more than money. They have lost their future. They have lost their hope. They are crushed.

Just as Detroit was not, and is not, alone, neither is auto manufacturing. The paper plants that built and powered Kalamazoo suffered the same fate. I touched on that in this excerpt from Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community.
  “The paper industry was to Kalamazoo what the auto industry was to Detroit and the furniture industry was to Grand Rapids. They built the cultures of their communities. Everyone knew the drill: Get out of high school with or without a diploma, get a job in the mills, or the factories, and you had a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle.

It all came crashing down. However, Western Michigan University survived. Kalamazoo’s place in the West Michigan higher education community was destined to grow.

But the other three legs of the stool broke one after another.  Kalamazoo didn’t only lose Big Paper; Kalamazoo also lost its place in the auto supply chain. And Kalamazoo lost Big Pharma. Upjohn, which was taken over by Pharmacia, which was taken over by Pfizer, closed facility after facility in Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor and Holland. 

Kalamazoo made the same mistake as Detroit and Grand Rapids; they took it all for granted, until it was all gone. Consider that one of the critical takeaways from this page. No matter how good things are going today, we have to keep working on tomorrow’s cluster of prosperity.

You can still see the collateral damage in Kalamazoo, just like in Detroit and Grand Rapids.  People who worked in the paper mills, the pharmaceutical labs, the auto factories and the furniture plants are walking the streets, sitting on porches, toiling at Subway or laying on their couches. These are people who still seem shell-shocked, people who worked every day, worked hard and were proud of it, piling up the cash that came from all the hours of double-and-triple time, using that money to buy the toys for adults and children, to buy the lakeshore cottages. They are at home now wondering where it all went.”

Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance, an ebook essay series, tells the story of the worst decade Michigan has ever seen, with a look at the problems that remain and what lies ahead.
For a free preview of all five essays, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan have changed the way the world sees their community and more importantly, the way they see the world.


To read preview chapters and order a personally autographed hardcover or softcover edition, please click here.


Autographed editions are also available at Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music on 28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center.


Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is also available wherever books are sold online, including Abbott Press.