Metal Fatigue: American Bosch and the Demise of Metalworking in the Connecticut River Valley (review)

From the early decades of the nineteenth century through the 1950s, manufacturing industries that relied on a community of skilled artisans flourished in the Connecticut Valley, the region between New Haven, Connecticut, and Springfield, Vermont. Here were found firms such as Winchester and Colt that still have immediate name recognition, as well as less-well-known companies, such as Jones & Lamson or Van Norman, which supplied vital machine tools for American industry. In the decades following 1960, most of these industries declined or departed. The well-paying jobs and community support they provided withered. Innovative tool-making companies, started by talented engineers, passed through second- or third-generation family members and then to absentee owners. The city of Springfield, Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit, first by the closure of the federal government's Springfield Amory and then the departure of most of its other precision manufacturers. A depleted tax base led to urban decay and eventually forced state-appointed managers to take over the city government. Robert Forrant gives us an account of these events as seen by a former union business agent at one of the Valley firms, American Bosch, a maker of sophisticated products for the automobile industry. While he focuses on the death struggles of American Bosch, he also describes the fate of other Valley industries, large and small, and the problems faced by their displaced workers.

The foreword to Metal Fatigue announces that it is a story "of greed, of malfeasance, and stupidity." In this spirit, Forrant draws most of his actors in black (managers) and white (union members). Managers closed or moved manufacturing elsewhere to enhance shareholder profits while unions filed grievances and called strikes to keep not only jobs, but jobs that preserved the union shop with it rules of seniority, checkoff, and customary practices. This is as far as Forrant goes in looking for causes of the demise of the Valley's machine-tool and precision metalworking industries. Readers will have to turn elsewhere for the many complex factors, beyond managerial malfeasance, that led to the decline of precision manufacturing in New England.

Valley industries were burdened by high energy costs, decayed transportation facilities, often-corrupt municipal governments, obsolete plants, dysfunctional school systems, and urban crime, to name some of the chief factors in their demise. Some of these problems originated as unintended consequences of policies of the federal government: for example, when American Bosch moved south it was the beneficiary of cheap TVA power. Welcoming, corruption-free local governments were an attraction. Workers who did not insist on customary practices and rigid job descriptions adapted more easily to new manufacturing techniques. The old, multistory factory buildings in the Valley lacked the floor-loading capacity needed for new machinery, and were difficult to bring up to new OSHA workplace requirements. New England industries once were served by an excellent rail network. It didn't survive federal subsidization of motor-vehicle transportation, rapacious local taxes, and unsustainable union work rules. Untreated industrial wastes that had passed into streams and landfills for decades had to be cleaned up. Emission controls were hard to install in older plants. All of these issues deserve examination in a story of the Valley industries.

In the 1960s Valley machine-tool artisans and entrepreneurs faced a true technical revolution in numerical-control techniques. They dithered while Germans and Japanese, who had had their industrial slates wiped clean by war and aid from the United States, took over New England's preeminent place as machine-tool makers. One is reminded of the eighteenth-century French innovators who created the then-revolutionary technique of manufacturing mechanisms with interchangeable parts. French artisans and entrepreneurs wanted no change in their traditional way of working; they blocked adoption of this technique in their country. Transferred to New England, which in 1800 had no established ways of working or customary practices, the new technique throve and...