Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

345 Pages·2017·3.2 MB·English

by  Brian Alexander

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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

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To the memories of:
Thomas Alexander
immigrant, master tool and die maker Cleveland, Ohio
Edward “E. B.” Stern
office boy/sales manager, McKee Glass/Thatcher Glass Jeannette, Pennsylvania
Robert Alexander
salesman/vice president, Lancaster Glass, independent manufacturers’
representative Lancaster, Ohio
Agnes “Bobby” Alexander Fairfield Heritage Association, Fairfield County
Hospital Twig 3, Miller for Congress co-chairwoman, League of Women Voters,
poll worker Lancaster, Ohio
“The nation-state at best is based on the social contract that is also
an emotional contract, stamped by the charisma of the past.”
—SVETLANA BOYM, The Future of Nostalgia
PREFACE
The Cop
Eric Brown’s chin trembled. He stopped talking, because if he kept going he was
going to cry, and, by God, he wasn’t going to cry. But then he did—a little—and
then I found myself tearing up, too. So there we were, two middle-aged men, a
cop and a reporter, sitting in a booth inside the Cherry Street Pub, clearing our
throats, dabbing the backs of our fingers to our eyes, hoping nobody would
notice.
By now I was used to people fighting the urge to cry. At first I was surprised:
The Lancaster, Ohio, I remembered was not a teary sort of place. But in the
months before Brown and I sat down together, I’d frequently had to pause to let
people gather themselves.
A gnarly old union man was the first, when he told me a story about a toolbox
his mentor in Anchor Hocking Plant 1 presented to him on the day the senior
glassmaker retired. The older man had fashioned the toolbox out of steel, used it
for over thirty years, and was now passing it on.
Most others choked up when they struggled to properly explain how much
they loved their town. Getting the explanation right was important to them
because they felt obliged to defend that love to an outsider—which was what I
was now—in the face of so many seemingly obvious reasons to leave.
I didn’t expect it from Brown, though. Maybe because he was a cop. He said,
“I felt I carried the weight of this community on my shoulders.” Ostensibly, he
was referring to his efforts to rid the community of heroin—which, he was quick
to point out, plagued not only Lancaster but every small city from the east side
of the Appalachians through Indiana, though Lancaster had somehow gotten the
reputation of being heroin heaven, a reputation Brown tended to blame on the
reporters who popped down U.S. 33—“Heroin Highway,” as many called it—
from Columbus on slow news days to do ninety-second stand-ups in front of
police headquarters.
Brown had run the Fairfield-Hocking Major Crimes Unit. About 90 percent
of “major crimes” in the two counties were somehow connected to drugs. And
so, he continued, “when you look around our community, all the bad things that
are happening seem to be centered around drugs. Man, that’s a lotta weight to
carry.”
For years Brown carried that weight like a Trojan. Well-known by his fellow
task force officers and administrators around the state of Ohio, he had earned a
reputation for being smart and sophisticated. His peers selected him to go to
Washington, D.C., to plead for funding. Yet he sensed he’d become cynical.
Cynicism wasn’t a natural fit for Brown. Born and raised in Lancaster, he
made a name for himself as a star football player at Lancaster High, and he was
still a solid guy with a palimpsest of golden-boy looks under the tempering that
decades of policing had laid down. After trying big-time college ball, Brown
returned to become a local policeman because he wanted to help protect his
town. Coming from anybody else, that would sound corny. But for Brown, who
could swear if he needed to, “Gosh!” and “My goodness!” were the natural
defaults. Eventually, he married a Hajost, and so into a prominent local family.
(As a teenager, I’d suffered through an unrequited crush on another Hajost girl.)
But it was these very hometown bonds that nurtured his cynicism. He’d come
to the conclusion that he and his fellow cops could arrest drug users and dealers
all day, every day, without making much of a dent in the problems that nagged
Lancaster. He wasn’t unique in this. After forty years of drug warring, police all
over the country were chanting “We can’t arrest ourselves out of this.” Unlike