After the Banquet

For most of its history, the city of Janesville in southern Wisconsin has gone about its business quietly and without a lot of fuss. It rarely made the national news and its history, on the surface at least, seems pretty much like that of many other mid-sized agro-manufacturing towns in the Midwestern portion of what is sometimes known derisively today as flyover country. Other than homeboy Paul Ryan, Janesville has produced few famous daughters or sons, although a handful of moderately well-known folk spent some time there. Abolitionist William Goodell, suffragette Frances Willard, George Safford Parker, founder of the Parker Pen Company, and the pioneering African-American medical doctor Daniel Hale Williams are probably the most notable of the lot, even if some might want to add to the list of luminaries drummer Tim Davis, co-founder of the Steve Miller Band, and actor Kerwin Mathews, star of such movies as The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad (1959), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), and Jack the Giant Killer (1962), for whom a short street in Janesville is named. Many readers are probably thinking Janesville equals Sleepytime Tea, then, right?

Not so fast. Before we relegate Janesville to the ho-hum, nice-place-to-live-but-wouldn't-want-to-visit pile, we need to remember that for eighty-six of its one hundred eighty-three years of existence—from 1923 through 2008—the city was home to a General Motors auto plant. For much of this period, Janesville and GM were pretty much conjoined, and this union created a mojo that rendered Janesville a city more interesting—not to say prosperous—than many of its size, whether in flyover district or on either coast. What happened to Janesville after GM left is the focus of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Goldstein's new book. Although no one narrative can capture completely what in fact did happen in (and to) Janesville after the auto plant closed down—and Goldstein is too good a journalist to try to manufacture one—it is open-and-shut that in this case what was good for GM wasn't so good for the town.

The fertile area around Janesville in what is now Rock County in south central Wisconsin—about seventeen miles north of the border with Illinois—began to be settled by European-Americans in the early 1830s. The town itself dates from 1835 and was incorporated in 1853. Janesville enjoyed robust growth in the first decades after settlement. Its population was around 3,450 in 1850, about 4,800 at the time of incorporation in 1853, and over 7,700 by 1860.

There were already a significant number of manufacturing establishments in Janesville by 1860, and the number continued to grow in the decades after the Civil War. Not surprisingly, flour mills, saw mills, and makers of agricultural implements were prominent in the town's early manufacturing portfolio, as was liquor making (this was Wisconsin, after all). In the late nineteenth century, Janesville emerged as something of a railroad hub, the manufacturing sector expanded further, and various foundries and fabricators could be found in the small but growing city—its population exceeded 13,000 by 1900—and Janesville seemed increasingly to embody the "virtuous" economic union of town and country, factory and farm that emerged in much of the Midwest.

The city's manufacturing portfolio also included the aforementioned Parker Pen Company, and the Janesville Machine Company, which was established in 1881, the result of the reorganization of a pre-existing concern, the Harris Manufacturing Company. The Janesville Machine Company's in-town facility grew rapidly to become the largest agricultural-implement factory in Rock County. The firm began making gas-powered tractors late in the 1910s, and in 1919 the brilliant, if half-crazed William C. ("Billy") Durant, founder of General Motors, desirous of getting into (yet) another market, bought the company, and quickly merged it with California-based Samson Tractor, which he had acquired in...