Today’s column is a must read.  He visits Detroit and laments the destruction of an industrial powerhouse that powered our WW2 victory and the prosperity of the Eisenhower era.  Sadly, we have abandoned all this for… what?   (For cheap furniture that falls apart in a few years, or cheap home electrics assembled by near slave labor?)

He used Professor Harley Shaiken (UofC Berkeley) to guide his observations.

Here are two quotes:

“We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.”

… We need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades. If there is any sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders, I’ve missed it.

Sadly, he is professor of language and literacy, with an expertise in labor – that’s too bad, because until the economists start showing the same concern, there will be no solution – and the solution is to craft an industrial policy, one that provides incentives for American manufacturing, and the production of good stable jobs.

I have already written on this issue, so have little more to say, just that the unseen hand of the marketplace is giving the worker the finger.

By the way, Detroit is not alone.  Many of our former powerhouse cities have vest empty stretches of unused and obsolete industrial space – most of this is in the rust belt.  So whether you visit Detroit yourself, or have the chance to pass through St. Louis or Springfield (OH) or Cleveland or Paterson (NJ) you’ll see for yourself the end result of a catastrophe as pervasive as a dead river and as long lasting as a mountainside that was mined into oblivion.

I’ll explain this video in moment.

The phrase “less is more” comes from a Robert Browning poem from the middle of the Victorian era. It summed up the modernist reaction to the excesses of the Victorian era. Although strongly associated with Mies Van Der Rohe and the Bauhaus (please Google if not familiar with either) it also informed the less dogmatic modernism of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright or by the commercial works done in the Art Deco spirit.

Mies and his Bauhaus colleagues eliminated all ornament; Wright and the Art Deco modernists did not. But even when ornament was allowed, it was no longer ok to lather it on like in the Paris Opera House. I picked the Chrysler Building as a contrast – yes, it is richly ornamented, but the ornamentation is moderated to fit with the building shape and style.

Ok, the video. Art and Life are alternately about excess and restraint. A summer flower garden can be wild with shape and color. Only a few artists are able to portray this sort of excess in a palatable way. A few did and do. One is David Hockney, whose work celebrates excess – yet he also celebrates restraint. He has lived mostly in the US since the early 1960s, though his new show is of work done back home in his native Yorkshire.

The first video show a muted real landscape – no color is brighter than a muted yellow. The few greens are pale. It is from my backyard, and represents a typical late fall landscape, on the cusp of winter.

This second video shows 2 painters who paint excess. The Cabanal is banal –when an artist can do everything, show every color, paint every texture, the effect is not always worthy of praise. The second piece is by my hero, Hockney. And no, not all excess is failure. In Nichols Canyon, David Hockney manages a riot of color, texture and shape. It’s a wonderful painting. Still the muted paintings of Camille Corot (the last four shown) show just how much one can say about a quite, cloudy day.

We (Americans) like to view a select group of less prosperous nations not with sympathy, but with self-satisfied scorn.  We do so especially for nations that we consider an ideological opponent.  Cuba is one, and we are right to be scornful of a nation that can’t get over their dependence upon a Soviet block that has long ceased to exist.  North Korea is another, and their situation is even more dire, but for much the same reason.  Since the end of WW2, they have depended upon aid from fellow communist nations who were willing to prop up their failed economy.  The only communist nation left to help is China – which itself has turned replaced communism with capitalism, but kept a communist false front. Regarding our own delusions, we have misinterpreted our past into a rosy free market creation story, a story as ridiculous as the most die hard communist tale.   And no, I don’t think we are as badly off as either Cuba or North Korea, but we are as blind.

Our creation myth starts with colonists and founding fathers, but the economic components adds untrammeled free market capitalism, where success came from solely from competition, drive and effort.  Even more nonsense is ladled on about how our freedom was created by our a constitutional democracy.  Today’s spillage will be about the economy, and it is a follow-on to my George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) posting a few days ago.

Let’s start with Robert Fulton.

Robert Fulton is maybe the second in the US Pantheon of inventors who moved us from being a backward agrarian nation to a first rate industrial power. The first was Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin and was one of a number of early experimenters with the use of power tools to create and assemble manufactured goods – thus presaging standardization of parts, and the assembly line.  Just as Whitney didn’t really “invent” standardized and interchangeable parts, so too, Fulton did not really “invent” the steamboat.  Nonetheless, he did perfect a steamboat that was designed for use on the Hudson.  But what he also did was something that was far more important for his success, he obtained a legal monopoly on steamboat use (for the Hudson) – a monopoly that lasted from 1807 to 1824 and that freed him up to perfect and fund his business without worrying about competition.

The 19^th century featured a series of technological improvements, highlighting the creativity of American mechanics (many of whom had been English, French or German mechanics till immigration brought them to our shores).  But much more important than our inventiveness, was the mere fact of having to fill up an empty country. *

Starting with canals, and moving to railroads, we needed ways to move goods and people to and from places that, until the canals came, were sparsely settled and where existence was hand to mouth.  The canal era fostered the growth of cash crops like grain; it also fostered settlement.  The railroad era similarly fostered settlement, and made irrelevant former market towns that were bypassed.  Railroads also required tons of steel, and more tons of coal, the mining of which itself increased the need for more steel and more coal.

Both canals and railroads required the acquisition of a right of way – generally sponsored or at least blessed by government.   The state of NY built the Erie Canal – but even “privately” funded canals required a state charter (so a monopoly).  Railroads were built entirely by private companies (as far as I can tell in my research), but just like with canals, they also required the award of a right of way – and for the transcontinental railroads, not only did Congress charter the Railroad, but it donated acres of extra land – used to fund some of the cost of building the new railroads.   (It even purchased additional land from Mexico to provide space for a Southern railroad – the Gadsen purchase).

As noted in my prior post, rails needed steel and coal, and as development followed, the new towns needed more coal, wood, cement, whale oil, dry goods, whiskey etc.  The growth that followed the building of the transcontinental railroads was astounding and unprecedented – yes, some aspects were unfortunate, but the building of our industrial capacity eventually made wide spread prosperity possible.   (But, it was not until civil authorities began to protect workers with progressive legislation, and not until unions took hold, that long term prospects improved for the American factory worker.)

Oh, one more thing, protective tariffs ensured that it was American goods that were shipped across the continent into the new towns.

Cycles of boom and bust continued, ending with the Great Depression, which may not have been ended by Roosevelt’s New Deal,*** but the “free economy” didn’t end the depression either.  In any case, it was not the markets – but federal programs which instilled a patience with the slow recovery, which however slow was now being watched by an administration that cared about the “little man.”

WW2 showed what massive government intervention could do.  And despite what free market ideologues say, the government did a good – yes, we have price controls and rationing, but the end result of a partially planned economy was the reinvigoration of our manufacturing sector, and when the vets came home (many to attend college in the GI Bill) an era of unprecedented prosperity followed.   (I am not implying that it was the programs alone, the times were uniquely suited for America – we were the only large power that was undamaged.

Somehow, after the 1940s the US seems to have forgotten our past.   There was only one major national post war project – the Interstate Highway System,** and that one was completed nearly 40 years ago.  At the same time, we resolved to eliminate tariffs.

Eliminating tariffs did make sense for foreign policy reasons.  That is to say, it was useful to concede some market share to our war damaged overseas competitors.  But we took the matter way too far.  For example, our entire consumer electronics market was ceded to Japan – who probably dumped goods in the early years to push past American TVs and radios.   The academic economists who made the case for open markets never factored in the loss of good jobs on real men and women.  Then we have the more mundane products like furniture and shoes.  These were typically made in rural areas like rural Maine, or NY State or the mountain south.  There is no glamour here, but we produce the hides and the trees, so have a natural advantage – yet we have ceded the shoes and the furniture.  (The shoes are all gone now, but a little furniture making is still being done).

It is not my place (or my skill set) to write either a full history or to make a detailed recommendation for the future.  But history suggests that the time is ripe for our government to direct the growth of new technology (much as it did railroads when they were new).  The technology I have in mind is that transmission of electricity.  Electricity can be produced by diverse means, from water power (dams and inertial power) to wind, to solar and nuclear, but it requires a single and integrated transmission system (the power grid) to use all the power we can produce.  One of the biggest bards to using wind power (especially) is the lack of adequate transmission line.

We should:

1)   Assess the grid’s capacity, and robustness (excess capacity, need for maintenance etc)

2)   Locate the need for additional capacity to pull in new sources – chiefly to rural areas

3)   Build it

4)   Nationalize the control and maintenance (take the grid away from the private power company)

With such a program we  would gain jobs, energy capacity, and potentially improve our ability to pivot from high carbon to green energy sources.  But it won’t happen if we wait for the market’s unseen hand.  That unseen hand never existed.

*Yes, I know the West was not really empty, but that Stone Age nomads peopled the Great Plains before the white settlers.  But like all such peoples who encountered western man, they were eventually defeated.  Perhaps we could have done better, but that would have required an historical perspective that was not ascendant  in the 19^th century.  In any case, this piece is not meant either to explore or ignore the plight of those who came first.

**The creation of the Interstate Highway System was as transformative as the transcontinental railroads had been.  And, like what happened with railroads, where towns that were bypassed died, so too, cities were in a sense “bypassed.”  The new suburbs grew, full of homeowners and a brand new infrastructure, while cities were left with those who couldn’t move away – the elderly, and the poor.  Old factories that once were at least close to the railhead – so retained an advantage with regard to shipping costs – now were unable to compete with their spanking new peers that were built close to the interstate (and could be accessed with little worry about traffic jams).  And while we damaged the revenue base of towns, we never thought to share the revenue from suburbs.  The result haunts us to this day.

*** If you are not familiar with the controversy around what ended the Great Depression, then it is enough to say that some say the New Deal was not large enough to counter the decrease in state and local spending, so that even with the stimulus, the New Deal was just too small.  Others, like Amity Shlaes (it’s the standard Republican view) point out that the New Deal was a failure, blunting recovery.  Paul Krugman takes the too little point of view, and continues to inveigh for more spending now.

“The error of Wilson in Mexico, of Nixon in Vietnam, of our whole quest for “self determination,” is clear: we have reversed the order of cause and effect.  Free elections are created by free men, not vice versa.  The machinery of election will not call up, establish, or guarantee political freedom.

From Gary Wills in Nixon Agonistes, copyright 1969, 1970 and 2002.

Gary Wills started his education by studying to be a Jesuit.  This didn’t last long.  Although he remains a Catholic, he never became a priest.  Eventually, he earned a Ph.D. in the classics, and has been both a successful teacher and writer, having written many works about politics, history and religion.  He was an early protégé of William F Buckley, but after he published Nixon Agonistes, he lost his place in conservative circles.  In fact, he became a Nixon enemy.

The quote is especially apt now, as we grope for a solution regarding Afghanistan.  Frankly, there is none, for Afghanistan is but a name on a map, peopled by a group of brave but completely disunited tribes.

The essence of life is death and renewal. We may not notice this within our own lives, because our life cycles are so long, nonetheless, the cycles are there. My mother lived to ripe old age, she was 87 when she died, and by that point, her kids were all grown and settled. Her grandkids were also almost grown too, with the oldest being 24 years old. At family gatherings, my mother’s place had moved from the center (being part of a team of sisters who cooked the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners) to the sidelines, when she was happy to watch the younger women cook, while she sipped a glass of Rosé.

Now the grandkids (my son, and his cousins) are moving past youth to full adulthood, so it will soon be time for our generation to sit on the sidelines.

The cycles in the garden are much more obvious. We are at the end of this year’s growth cycle, with the remaining leaves dry and falling, and the once bright summer flowers flattened.

The death cycle should not be completely gloomy – in a long life, like with my late mother, the story of her death was mostly that of a life well lived. The garden’s cycle is even more tinged with hope. The fall presents fleeting glimmers of dazzle, at least up north, as our various leaves change to bright golden yellows and brilliant reds. The brilliance last for only a few days or weeks at the most, and then it’s over.