Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault

I really liked this book. It is a memoir about the toll an enormous paper mill reaped on the environment, the workforce, and inhabitants of Kerri Arsenault's home town of Mexico, Maine. As an environmental history, Mill Town provides an excellent source on the the harmful effects of large factories, chemicals, and toxic waste have on the interconnected human and natural world. It is one more reminder that these are not two separate spheres with nature as some sort of other world. As Rachel Carson demonstrated in Silent Spring sixty years ago, people and birds share the same fate. Mill Town discusses environmental policies, corporate denial, collusion between politics and industry, and waste disposal. Arsenault offers a deeply personal account of the agonizing death of her father, a lifetime mill worker. Mill Town chronicles how Arsenault pieced together the story of Mexico's cancer epidemic through interactions with family members, neighbors, townsfolk, and the historical records. It is part socio-economic history of the mill, the town, the rise of industry in the early twentieth century and its precipitous decline in the 1980s, intermingled with the story of the rise and fall of the working class and the effects of automation. Towards the end she examines how  her generational  cohort, those who graduated high school in the 1980s, split into two different groups: one who left Mexico, as she did, and another who remained in the town and even took one of the declining numbers of jobs at the mill. As a reader, I got the sense that the latter harbors considerable resentment towards the former for abandoning their town and leaving their own parents behind to be cared for by others. 

On another level this is a very compassionate story of "fly-over" country, the one that was totally left behind in the post-Cold War economic boom of the 1990s but still felt the vicious sting of the great recession, opioids (something mentioned but not explored), broken families, and declining home values, among other traumas. Only a page or two are devoted to the 2016 election, but it is clear that the author, while personally opposing Donald Trump, understands why many in her former home town cast their ballots for him. If one is unfamiliar with the America Arsenault describes than this empathetic exploration of it would be a good starting point. 

Bethlehem Steel

One of the my favorite ways to relax is to wonder the stacks in the library glancing at the books for something that catches my fancy. When I stumbled on Kenneth Warren's Bethlehem Steel I couldn't resist. I earned my PhD at Lehigh University in the shadow of the hulking, defunct Bethlehem Steel mill. It was enormous. The complex stretched for miles. At that point in the 1990s, it operated under very limited capacity. Now, twenty years later I was finally going to read about the company that built this enormous plant with its rust, broken windows, and abandon equipment laying in the yards.

The title really captures the essence of Bethlehem Steel. It started as a small scale iron producer in a region with many. It was among the first to jump to steel an adopt the Bessemer. While lauded for its quality, Bethlehem Steel lagged behind competitors in the midwest that had access to more markets and cheaper ore. The company took off around 1900 when if moved into naval construction, was purchased by Charles Schwab, and secured several large contracts. In the 192os it profited from the building boom stretching across the United States. Like most firms, it suffered immensely during the Great Depression. It did well in World War II and grew significantly in the 1950s through sales and acquisitions. Production peaked in the 1970s and then started the thirty year decline that culminated with Bethlehem Steel's absorption by the International Steel Group in 2003.

Two things really caught my attention. First, the long term effects of recessions. Something that seems minor in historical hindsight, such as the 1982 recession, which is dwarfed by the economic boom of the 1980s, hit Bethlehem Steel really hard and had long term impacts. Second, was the devolution of the 1970s-1990s. A century before, it was all about consolidation of integration, which meant controlling all the lines of production from raw materials to sales of finished product. Yet, one hundred years later, Bethlehem Steel was following the model of Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca and selling off its subsidiaries, sources of raw materials, etc. The circle was coming around.