Still from the film, "As Goes Janesville," 2012.
My hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, has become a popular backdrop for national politicians who want to talk about jobs, thanks in part to Paul Ryan’s rising star as a vice presidential candidate and now Speaker of the House. High-profile visits include Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016. Vice President Mike Pence dropped by this year.
But Janesville was making headlines for a different reason when I visited my dad this past April. A local resident broke into a gun shop just outside of town, stole handguns, rifles, and silencers and then—poof!—disappeared. The prime suspect, Joseph Jakubowski, had mailed a 161-page anti-government manifesto to Donald Trump, setting off a national manhunt and media frenzy.
For ten days, the burglar's absence, along with his stash of firearms, put my hometown on edge, disrupting school schedules, threatening to cancel Easter festivities, and dominating breakfast conversations at the Wedge Inn.
Then Jakubowski was captured without incident on Good Friday.
“You’re the first person who’s listened to me,” he told the man who turned him in.
Janesville: An American Story, which I happened to be reading at the time, evokes a similar sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and neglect. The book, by Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein, explores what happens to a town when jobs go away.
In 2008, two days before Christmas, the last SUV rolled off the GM assembly line in Janesville, and “the plant,” as I have always known it, has been closed ever since. Goldstein gives a clear eye to the sometimes heart-breaking ways that the city and its residents have struggled to respond.
“Janesvillians can read this book with pride in our gumption, if they can get through the passages that show how we failed,” The Janesville Gazette wrote in a review.
"Janesvillians can read this book with pride in our gumption, if they can get through the passages that show how we failed.”
It wasn’t just GM jobs that went away. The shutdown’s impact rippled across the entire community. In all, 9,000 jobs disappeared from Janesville, as the layoffs spread from GM to local suppliers like Lear Corp., a seat-making factory. As a classmate of mine from high school put it, “Every Janesville family directly or indirectly worked for GM.”
The book opens in 2008 with a fateful phone call from GM’s CEO to Ryan, then just a congressman, and ends in 2013, followed by an epilogue. In between, it chronicles a community that pulled together in crisis but then gets pulled apart.
Tensions reached a boiling point in 2011, when Republican Governor Scott Walker gutted the state’s public-sector unions, a strategy that also divided communities across the state. Some of the same characters who appear in Janesville also appear in As Goes Janesville, a 2012 film documentary. Goldstein describes the scene in which billionaire businesswoman Diane Hendricks asks Walker whether he could make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, prompting his comment that his goal was to pursue a “divide and conquer” strategy.
In the end, after repeatedly denying his intent to do so, Walker signed a state right-to-work bill into law. Hendricks went on serve on Donald Trump's inaugural committee.
At the heart of Goldstein’s book are stories about Janesville’s working-class families.
Two teen-age daughters take on five part-time jobs between them as they dream about college. Their father moves from one workplace to another, never able to match the pay and benefits he got at GM.
Goldstein describes riding home one Friday night with a carload of “GM gypsies,” laid-off workers who have given up weekdays with family for a steady paycheck at the GM plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a 4½-hour drive away.
A man from a long line of union workers worries about how to tell his dad he’s taking a job in management. His wife, a high school dropout also got laid off, earned her GED, enrolled in a job-retraining program at the local technical college, and went to work with adults with developmental disabilities.
Janesville is told in fifty-five vignettes from the perspectives of different people, including auto workers, educators, politicians, and business and community leaders.In two appendices, Goldstein explained how she worked with economists and other researchers to better understand the larger context behind the individual stories she tells. One surprising finding, for example, was that laid-off workers who participated in job-retraining programs were less likely to have a job than workers who did not retrain.
The surprising finding was that workers who participated in job-retraining programs were less likely to have a job.
By the end of her book, Goldstein has described two Janesvilles: One, a well-off and well-connected community, prides itself on its entrepreneurial efforts to reinvent Janesville. The other struggles to stay ahead of mortgage payments, still hurting “no matter how vigorously they have clung to the old can-do.”
It’s not clear what will come of the glimmers of hope that Goldstein highlights in her book. By 2017, the unemployment rate for the Janesville area had dropped to about 4 percent—but wages were nowhere near the $28 an hour that GM was paying when it closed up shop.
Janesville remains a work in progress.
In 2016, after thirty-two years of supporting Democrats for President, Wisconsin helped tip Trump into the White House.
“Were these Trump voters?” somebody asked Goldstein about the people in her book at a reading in Washington.
Clinton received 52 percent of the vote in Rock County, where Janesville is the county seat. But Clinton’s margin was 10 percentage points below Obama’s in 2012. It wasn’t that Janesville area Democrats voted for Trump, Goldstein says; many of them just didn’t vote.
As it happens, in the hours before Goldstein’s Washington book reading, Ryan was making news up on Capitol Hill, having collected enough votes to get Trump's health care bill through the House. The bill would deny coverage to millions of people, including a big chunk of his constituents back in Janesville.
Mary Beth Marklein is a journalist based in Washington, D.C.