The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

from 140,000 to 95,000, with no end in sight.
    John Russo, a former auto worker from Michigan and professor of labor studies, started
     teaching at Youngstown State University in 1980. When he arrived, he could look down
     almost every city street straight into a mill and the fire of a blast furnace. He
     came just in time to watch the steel industry vanish before his eyes. Russo calculated
     that during the decade between 1975 and 1985, fifty thousand jobs were lost in the
     Mahoning Valley—an economic catastrophe on an unheard-of scale. Yet, Russo said, “The
     idea that this was systemic didn’t occur.” As a resident expert, he would get a call
     from Time or Newsweek every six months, with a reporter on the line asking if Youngstown had turned the
     corner yet. Apparently it was impossible to imagine that so much machinery and so
     many men were no longer needed.
    It was happening in Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem,
     Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, St. Louis, and other cities across a region
     that in 1983 was given a new name: the Rust Belt. But it happened in Youngstown first,
     fastest, and most completely, and because Youngstown had nothing else, no major-league
     baseball team or world-class symphony, the city became an icon of deindustrialization,
     a song title, a cliché. “It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had,” Russo
     said. “If a plague had taken away this many people in the Midwest, it would be considered
     a huge historical event.” But because it was caused by the loss of blue-collar jobs,
     not a bacterial infection, Youngstown’s demise was regarded as almost normal.
    *   *   *
    Tammy was eleven when the mills started closing. She was too young to know or care
     about Steeltown, the historic strikes, deindustrialization, or the specter of a whole
     city’s ruin. She had her hands full surviving her own life. The year after Black Monday,
     she moved back with her mother and stepfather to the east side. Officially, she lived
     with them in a house on Bruce Street, but in fact she was staying with Granny again
     on Charlotte. The summer after she returned, their front door was stolen—it was a
     solid oak antique, with a glass oval—along with the ornamental cut-glass windows that
     surrounded it. A few of their neighbors’ houses got hit by the same thieves. Granny
     couldn’t afford to replace it, so they boarded up the front door and for several years
     they went in and out the back door. There were times when Tammy was too embarrassed
     to have friends visit.
    The theft of the door marked a turning point that she would often refer to in later
     years, a sign that the family’s struggles were becoming part of something larger.
     The mob no longer had control of the streets (even though Cyrak’s wasn’t far from
     Charlotte Avenue), and the neighborhood was getting bad. By the midseventies most
     of the white families had moved out of the east side, and Black Monday finished the
     exit. When Miss Sybil had graduated from East High School in 1964, the majority of
     the student body was white, and after her class elected a black girl as homecoming
     queen, a white teacher overruled the vote, saying “It’s not time yet.” But with every
     year of the seventies, Tammy’s class photo had one or two fewer white kids, until,
     by the time she entered high school in 1980, East was almost all black and Puerto
     Rican. The high school was within walking distance of Charlotte Avenue, but in ninth
     grade Tammy was bused to Wilson High on the south side for racial balance. Her best
     friend, Gwen, was the only other black kid in math class, and the teacher would totally
     ignore them when they had their hands up. She missed being at a predominantly black
     school, so in tenth grade she transferred to East.
    She took on bigger responsibilities at home, learning to do simple repairs, taking
     the bus to shop for groceries and