In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization
  • Thomas Lassman
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. xiv + 372 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8871-0, $24.95 (paper).

By the 1970s, the American economy was in the midst of a wrenching transformation that eviscerated once-venerable manufacturing industries on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. The extent of the wreckage was unprecedented, as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore, and scores of other communities across the country experienced plant shutdowns and massive employee layoffs. No longer able to compete effectively in an increasingly global economy dominated by more nimble foreign firms, American producers of steel, automobiles, and other capital-intensive goods closed aging factories and shifted their resources to new locales outside the Rust Belt. In 1982 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison published The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York, 1982). In that politically charged study, the authors addressed the urgent political and economic crises that faced displaced industrial workers, their communities, and the businesses that supported them. Now, more than twenty years later, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott have assembled [End Page 350] a set of provocative new essays that place the themes discussed in the earlier volume within a broader historical context.

The thirteen essays in Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization seek to explain 'deindustrialization' as a dynamic historical process, not as a static experience rooted in specific geographical locations or industrial artifacts. "What was labeled deindustrialization in the intense political heat of the late 1970s and early 1980s," Cowie and Heathcott write in the introduction, "turned out to be a more socially complicated, historically deep, geographically diverse, and politically perplexing phenomenon than previously thought" (p. 2). They continue, "The central challenge of this volume, then, is to describe a temporary, historically bound set of conditions that are experienced in terms of permanence by ordinary people in daily life" (p. 4). This process is explored from multiple perspectives, drawn from a diverse set of analytical tools: employee narratives, artistic commemoration, media representations, race and gender relations, local, regional, and national politics; and environmental activism.

The volume is split into five sections. Part I addresses the causes, impact, and timing of deindustrialization in Yonkers, New York, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Lansing, Michigan. In 1954 the Alexander Smith Company closed its textile manufacturing plant in Yonkers and relocated production to a new facility in Greenville, Mississippi. Tami Friedman shows how Yonkers's failure to remain competitive as a manufacturing center was driven more by the mobility of capital and labor during the postwar boom than by the rapid decline of the industrial economy that began in the 1970s. The closing of the Diamond Reo truck plant in Lansing in 1975 occurred under somewhat different circumstances. Here, the outcome, as described by Lisa Fine, was driven by local factors, most notably changes in the urban spatial and economic landscape, as well as broad national trends in Cold War defense policy and the restructuring of American industry by a new breed of corporate raiders. Bryant Simon's examination of the movie house district in Atlantic City shows how responses to desegregation in the 1960s, especially among predominantly white middle-class tourists, shattered local racial divisions that movie theaters had traditionally exploited for their own economic advantage. Tragically, Bryant concludes, the end of segregation ultimately helped push the city's movie theaters and related entertainment venues into a protracted decline.

Part II shifts the mode of analysis to the tension between economic growth and decline and environmental pollution and remediation. Kent Curtis examines how the country's largest Superfund site—the former Anaconda copper smelting operation in Montana—was transformed by corporate interests, by the Environmental Protection [End Page 351] Agency, and by local boosters into a signature golf course to drive the region's newly fashioned leisure economy. A similar study by Richard Newman on the Love Canal in the 1970s adds another theme into the mix, namely, the role played by local activists to come to terms with the Niagara region's deindustrialization and the...

pdf

Share