The Great Collapse, The Years When Everything Went Wrong

The Great Collapse

Chapter One

By Rod Kackley

Author’s note: This is an excerpt from the Great Collapse, the first in  the ebook essay series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance.
(Photo: Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant, from Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled exhibition)


Life was good. We were living the American Dream. Manufacturing is what made it all happen. Manufacturing is what made it all possible. Manufacturing was the industry that drove possibilities. It meant we Boomers could go to college. It meant our parents could look forward to a retirement with grandchildren, Social Security, a pension and health care.

Even if you never set foot in a factory, you reaped the benefits. Companies that didn’t have unions still had to compete with union pay and benefits or they would never get anyone decent. Manufacturing made all of that happen for all of us.

Don’t think for a minute that it was the corporations alone that made it happen.  It was the people on the lines, assembly and picket lines. It was the people who had made it to the Middle Class in their blue collars who reached down and pulled more people up to stand with them. They were the people who pumped money back into the economy. They were the people who were the job creators. They just didn’t know it at the time.

The auto industry brought my family to Michigan from Missouri. It is the typical story of a family facing hard times in the Depression, moving with what little they could carry in their trucks, a Grapes of Wrath movement north. My father and his brother would be sent back to the farms for the summer so that their mother could get more hours in at the GM plant in Flint.  Back home, they used BB guns to shoot cockroaches off the walls of the apartment they would have to leave as soon as the rent came due.

It was the auto industry that put bread on my father’s table in those days and it was that GM plant in Flint that helped my grandmother move them into the Middle Class. It was the auto industry that employed my father’s mother, a single parent widowed at an early age. It was the auto industry where anyone in Flint with the last name of “Kackley” could find a job in the plants because of my grandmother’s tenure with General Motors.

And it was the auto industry that my father ran from, joking that he escaped from the auto factory assembly line, entering World War Two, so he could finally get some “peace and quiet.”

It was the unions that won, for single parents like my grandmother from the South a chance at a new life, a more than livable wage, a fairly decent work environment, and most importantly a sense of justice.

It was the unions that battled for the workers. Union leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their “rank-and-file” walking picket lines in the snow and bitterly cold winds of Michigan, fighting toe-to-toe in mortal hand-to-hand combat with the thugs hired by the Big Three to keep union organizers out of Detroit and Flint.

It was the unions and the Big Three, finally reaching a mutually profitable, spit-in-your-face, don’t tread on me, partnership after years of bloody struggle that promised my father’s generation a middle class lifestyle that included health care, retirement, and a better life for their children.

It all changed. Not quickly. Not fast. We were more like those frogs in boiling water who don’t know they are cooked until they are cooked.

It only got worse after my friends and I in the Class of ‘73 started our adult lives. Manufacturing started seizing up like our parents’ lungs after too many years of Pall Mall, Lucky Strike and other fine tobacco. And just like our parents whose lungs and hearts could take no more, manufacturing collapsed. It died. The auto industry went down and dragged everything else with it.

The Great Collapse, the first ebook essay in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series is available wherever ebooks are sold. For immediate download, and previews of the other essays in the series, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community, the story of how the people of one community have changed the way the world sees their hometown, and the way it sees the world,  is available wherever books are sold including Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center in Grand Rapids.

Last Chance Mile: the Reinvention of an American Community is also available wherever books are sold online, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Abbott Press.
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