One of the rants we hear a good deal lately from a certain quarter has to do with the death of manufacturing in the United States and some unhinged speculation about bringing it back by destroying the international trade on which for generations we have depended.
But what was this industry? When and where did it flourish?
I’ve been visiting Louisville which, like most midwestern cities, was built on a base of manufacturing, implemented by Ohio River shipping and major freight train lines, but I’ve never known exactly what these long-vanished industries were.
Sunday afternoon a lecture by Gary Falk, author of several books including Made in Louisville, began my education. The lecture was presented at my granddaughter Sadie Iovenko’s thriving community center at The Beuchel Train Depot which she has restored.
Falk showed slides of an incredible number of large manufacturers in downtown Louisville, started and run by local men, sometimes father and son teams, from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, the basis for a thriving prosperity.
There was a wooden airplane and furniture factory, Mengel, in substantial brick building—wooden airplanes were no longer built after one of the first crashed and burned in Okalona, killing everybody on board; Rumplemeyer’s Furniture at 18 and Rowan Streets; Peters, Webb and Co., maker of pianos and organs—we saw a photo of an enormous room full of dozens of pianos being tuned; The Grainger Company, builder of iron works that supplied the structure for municipal buildings and hotels; the Ballard Flour Mills whose founder built the house where I grew up; and an ice cream industry where the machine was invented and manufactured that made the brick shaped ice cream and is still in use today although run by robots. The disco ball I saw hanging over the basement swimming pool in Doris Duke’s Newport house was made by a manufacturer in Louisville.
The enormous brick industrial complexes, filling whole blocks downtown, have nearly all been demolished. One has been turned into studios for individual glass makers, and it seems to me this is the way we are going and must go. The army of often unionized laborers that ran these industries no longer exists, and we probably have lost the discipline—or the leaned subservience—that makes such lifelong labor possible.
Instead we have the growth of small creative enterprises like the ones I saw today at Sadie’s farmer’s market: the man who sells twenty kinds of microgreens; the Burbon honey maker (I’m trying this); the woman who sells beeswax scented candles; the lettuce and radish farmer; the sourdough bread baker. Many of these stands were being run by women— mother and daughter teams, many African American—making small profits but proceeding undaunted.
This is our future. It is a future that depends on the hard work of women and African Americans; women certainly played no role in early manufacturing, and African Americans would have been limited to the lowest-paid jobs.
But this future means a dramatically down-scaled version of the consumerism that has ravaged us and kept the economy going, at least since President Bush Jr. told us after 9/11 to go out and buy: abandoning big box stores and supermarkets in favor of small independent suppliers. Less money spent, less money earned, less waste and packaging—and a resetting of our distorted priorities.
And women will lead the way.
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