Ruin, Revival, and Something in Between: Memoirs of the Rust Belt

For nearly one hundred years, from roughly the early 1870s until the early 1970s, the industrial growth of the Midwest made the U.S. the world's dominant economic power. Midwestern cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Milwaukee, and Flint were pillars of the country's industrial might. Many of them are known by their principal industry: Motor City, Glass City, and Rubber Capital. The wealth generated created world-renowned museums, symphonies, hospitals, libraries, parks, and important cultural institutions. Industrial production was as midwestern as growing corn.

The boom period ended, and the region was branded the Rust Belt in 1984 when Walter Mondale used the term during his failed presidential bid.¹ Since then, the struggles of Rust Belt residents have led to a proliferation of published memoirs. As a genre, memoir has evolved from Will Rogers's time when he reportedly said, "memoir means when you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad ones you did do." The Rust Belt memoirs collected here—a small but strong, representative sample—show another type, with writers including the good, the bad, and the ugly. All start as stories of growing up, witnessing decline, and looking for a way out. Some leave and look back, others leave and return, and, occasionally, some don't leave at all.

In Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, Eliese Collette Goldbach shares her story of growing up in Cleveland in the early 2000s. After high school, she attended a Jesuit college in Steubenville, Ohio, hoping to become a nun, but instead becoming the victim of sexual assault and returning to her family in Cleveland and facing an uncertain future. One of the book's defining moments is the author's trip to Washington, DC to visit a girlfriend. Out at a bar with her friend, two attorneys—friends of her girlfriend—smirk at the idea that Cleveland produces anything of value. Soon after, Goldbach returns to Cleveland and lands a job at ArcelorMittal steel mill. After two weeks of safety training, she moves on to the factory floor packaging coils of steel and replays the conversation in the bar imagining what she'd have to say to the attorneys now that she's seen the mill's productivity first-hand. As part of an effort to streamline its operations, the company sells off the mill and lays off its workers. Goldbach returns to the academic world to find success by completing her undergraduate degree and a master's in creative writing from Cleveland State University.

Goldbach did not grow up consciously identifying as someone from the Rust Belt. Factories were something in the background. It was not until her job in a Cleveland steel mill, something of an accident, where she discovered the roots of a Rust Belt identity. On the mill floor, she developed an appreciation for the job's danger and the blunt candor of her fellow workers who became like family. Goldbach's conversation with the Washington, DC lawyers is a symbolic moment in her story. She is immediately identified by her native geography but does not know enough to explain its importance. It is only after she returns to her hometown to work a job in a steel mill that she understands her region's importance—rust and all.

Flint, Michigan, native Gordon Young's book, Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, combines his personal story of growing up in Flint in the 1980s and its...