MVP’s Sports Bar & Grill is one of those places crouched in the shadow of every factory in America: shiny veneer walls on linoleum floors; neon beer signs in more variety than available brands; a low white ceiling that goes gray with haze after shift changes because just about everybody here smokes. The nondescript metal exterior that wraps it all together says the exterior isn’t the point. Norman Rockwell had his barber shops. Towns like Decatur have this.
One indispensable feature of such places is that they don’t recognize their own blue-collar symbolism, but that was ruined last summer when MVP’s was designated as the unofficial metaphor for Decatur’s latest economic woes.
In late June, the national media descended, once again, on the battered industrial city of 81,860, this time to record the death throes of the Bridgestone/Firestone tire factory, across the street from MVP’s. Wounded by a changing economy and one of the worst product safety disasters in U.S. history, the plant would begin shedding its 1,380 remaining employees in the fall and close by New Year’s Day, company officials announced June 27.
Anywhere else, it would have been a business story. But this is Decatur, so the story instead is about irony, about yet another thing that’s not going right in a town that calls itself “The Pride of the Prairie,” about another chapter in the ongoing tragedy of the industrial age.
At least, that’s the story interviewers kept trying to get from MVP’s bartender and owner, a stocky man named Larry Goetz. But Goetz is in no mood to be metaphorical. Three years earlier he had moved his tavern practically to the gates of the tire plant, like a hunter following the herd, and now the herd is dispersing. As a human interest story, it’s priceless, but that’s not going to solve Goetz’s problem, which is that his primary customer base is about to become unemployed. So he spent several annoying days shooing television satellite trucks out of his parking lot and growling at reporters to order something or quit taking up barstools.
Goetz’s coolness toward the media is as common in the central Illinois town as the smokestacks. Decatur may be the most media-weary small city in America. It isn’t every small city, after all, that gets picked on regularly by the Wall Street Journal and CNN. So when yet another reporter wanders in and sits down one day in late September —shortly after the first round of workers had left the nearby tire plant for good, 335 potential bar patrons gone — Goetz’s reaction is understandable. He sees the notebook, sets his jaw, and says curtly: “Kinda busy for a talk right now, guy.”
Wishful thinking? At lunchtime on this weekday, empty metal-and-vinyl chairs vastly outnumber the 13 patrons scattered around MVP’s.
Goetz, softened up by the sale of a hamburger, fries and cola at $3.70, estimates that the daily crowd during better times was more like 40, most of them Bridgestone/Firestone employees. “There are people who are just flat moving out of town. They’re leaving this town and going to other towns where the jobs are. I see people really worried about money now. They’re not partying like they used to. There’s a lot of unsure feelings going around.’’
Goetz understands, though he does not use theoretical language to define it, that MVP’s operates under an economic model that assumes towns like Decatur enjoy a “triple impact” from factories like Bridgestone/Firestone. Economics Professor Anthony Libertore, who operates from a very different Decatur locale, the private Millikin University, fills in the theory’s terminology. “That’s the rule-of-thumb for direct spending as it ripples through the local economy.’’
The factory worker gets paid and has an after-work beer at MVP’s; MVP’s uses part of that income to pay its employees, who use part of that pay to buy groceries; the grocery store uses part of that sale to pay its clerks, and so on. By the time that money is spent and re-spent until none of it is left, it has created local economic activity worth, on average, three times the value of the original paycheck.
What may sound like a fancy take on common sense, means that for every $1 in lost payroll here, there is a $3 impact on the local economy.
The lost payroll from Bridgestone/ Firestone alone will total about $100 million annually. And that’s not taking into account cutbacks at other major local employers such as Caterpillar, the heavy-equipment manufacturer whose local workforce has dropped from more than 5,000 to less than 2,500 in recent years.
But to understand Decatur’s troubles it may take more than an economist. It also might take a psychologist. Or perhaps an exorcist. One frequent joke — or theory, depending on whom you talk to — is that Decatur is cursed.
The temptation to look for a sole negative force is hard to resist. Once the hardship began, it snowballed into an ever-worsening cycle of sorrows.
It was a question of efficiency, Bridgestone/Firestone says, that led to the decision to close the Decatur plant; the company wanted to consolidate its output through fewer factories.
Maybe it all began in 1994, when, in one of the most remarkable coincidences in modern labor history, more than 6 percent of Decatur’s workforce was either on strike or locked out by management because of unrelated labor disputes at tire-maker Bridgestone/ Firestone Inc., earth-moving equipment producer Caterpillar and corn processor A.E. Staley Manufacturing Co. The spectacle of a whole city on a picket line drew global media attention and saddled Decatur with the nickname “Striketown, U.S.A.’’ A year later, Archer Daniels Midland, the Decatur-based agricultural processing giant, landed at the center of a worldwide price-fixing scandal that came to involve high-tech corporate spying, accusations of embezzlement and a suicide attempt.
Then there were the two unrelated tornadoes that struck Decatur within 24 hours of each other in 1996, damaging 200 homes and drawing scrutiny from meteorologists everywhere.
In 1999, a different kind of storm hit. That year, Decatur became ground zero in a national debate over race and “zero-tolerance’’ school disciplinary policies after the Rev. Jesse Jackson led marches through town and got himself arrested while protesting the expulsions of six black Decatur high school students for fighting at a school event. The city won its battle over policy, but arguably lost the larger war over public opinion.
The scars from these traumas had not healed when Decatur suffered its unkindest cut. In the fall of 2000, the country was talking about Firestone tires on SUVs coming apart at high speeds. Some looked to Decatur for an explanation. With the nationwide death toll rising past 200, Ford Motor Co. and others alleged that the Decatur factory was the source of a suspiciously high percentage of the flawed tires. One of the more painful accusations — completely unproven — was that Decatur’s famously bitter labor atmosphere had spawned incompetence or sabotage in the factory.
Alone, each of these events would have shown up on the national media’s radar. Together, they formed a pattern of astounding bad luck, which proved irresistible to professional pontificators. “People who live in small towns ... tend to be pleasantly surprised when they venture out-of-state and encounter big-city dwellers who can summon salient facts about the travellers’ home towns,’’ began a full-length piece on the city’s woes in an October 2000 issue of The New Yorker. “Residents of Decatur, Illinois, though, have learned not to get all that thrilled.’’
An epilogue of sorts was written this year. On June 27, Bridgestone/ Firestone vice president John McQuade greeted reporters in front of the factory — a low, sprawling brick building, 45 acres under one roof, dominating the city’s cement-gray north side — and tried to let Decatur down easy. “This is not the kind of announcement anyone wants to have to make,’’ McQuade began. The factory, one of Decatur’s biggest employers, will close by year’s end, he told those gathered. It was a business decision, he assured them, and not an indictment of the Decatur workers. But at MVP’s Sports Bar & Grill and other places around town, few believed this.
Roger Gates, president of local 713 of the United Steelworkers of America, commiserated with other soon-to-be unemployed Firestone workers at the union headquarters down the street from the factory. “I think [Decaturites] have felt all along that Decatur was being singled out and used as a scapegoat’’ for the tire-related deaths.
This time, Decatur looked down for the count. Mayor Terry Howley, who has long argued his city is the victim of a media smear campaign, jokes that he has quit offering socio-economic explanations when asked about Decatur’s problems, and has taken instead to simply admitting the place is haunted.
Beyond supernatural explanations for the problems is the real-world notion that Decatur, with all its troubles, is a metaphor for the unsure future of blue-collar America. That’s how state Sen. Duane Noland, a Republican whose district includes Decatur, sees it. “It’s not just Decatur, Illinois. It’s symptomatic of the Midwest and all the areas that rely heavily on industrial jobs — Columbus, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan.’’
Statistically, Decatur’s economy is relatively strong; just ask Decatur officials. The metropolitan area had a 5.9 unemployment rate in August, down by three-tenths of a percent from the previous month, even as the statewide rate rose from 5.3 to 5.5. Forbes magazine last year ranked Decatur as the best small city in America in which to do business.
But when hard times hit, they tend to hurt more in Decatur, where the biggest chunk of the roughly 39,000 workers — more than 11,000 employed people — report to jobs in manufacturing, construction or transportation. “Decatur is more sensitive to industrial swings’’ than university cities like Champaign or government towns like Springfield because of its reliance on blue-collar jobs, says Millikin economist Libertore. “Decatur is more vulnerable to the business cycle and to world events.’’
In fact, much of Decatur’s fate these days is determined in corporate board rooms on the other side of the world.
When A.E. Staley’s contract talks came up in the early 1990s, the employees misread their new foreign owners — the London-based Tate & Lyle, which had purchased the old family-owned corn processor in 1988 — and found themselves locked out. Ultimately, the workers had to return on the company’s terms, and the union never fully recovered.
The decision to shut down the Bridgestone/Firestone plant was made in Tokyo, by Japanese owners who have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the wake of accidents stemming from tire failures.
“You’re somewhat powerless when they make these decisions’’ from other parts of the world, says Mayor Howley. “When you’re in Tokyo, you don’t see this city. It’s just a dot on a map.’’
And maybe Decatur’s prosperity, like that of other industrial towns around the nation, was built on a shaky premise: That it would always be possible to step out of high school and into a life-long factory job that paid more than many college-educated professionals made. At its peak, Firestone was paying Decatur workers up to $20 an hour. The math worked for a while, in post-World War II America, when it seemed there was so much to be built that there would always be room at the conveyor belt for everyone. It may no longer work in a post-NAFTA world.
The problem, explains Libertore, has to do with the crucial “value-added’’ aspect of manufacturing jobs. A pair of shoes are only marginally more valuable than the raw leather used to make them. That profit margin is too small to support the kind of salary that Americans demand, which is why most of the American shoe industry has been exported to countries where workers will accept less pay. Finished computer chips, meanwhile, are worth far more than the raw silicon used to make them. So the computer chip industry can continue to pay American-sized salaries to the workers who produce them. Put simply, their work adds enough value to the raw material to support their salaries. Tires — along with tractors and processed agricultural products, Decatur’s other two major exports — are somewhere between shoes and computer chips on the “value-added’’ scale. It’s mathematically possible for the workers’ labor to add enough value to the rubber, metal and grain to keep those jobs here, but it’s not assured. Whether the formula works depends largely on how efficient the companies can make the manufacturing process.
It was that question of efficiency, Bridgestone/Firestone says, that led to the decision to close the Decatur plant; the company wanted to consolidate its output through fewer factories. It contends Decatur was targeted because it’s the oldest of Firestone’s nine American plants and has the smallest output, about 10 percent of Firestone’s domestic tire production.
As for the effect on Decatur’s psyche, it almost doesn’t matter whether the tire plant actually was at fault for the accidents — and that question is still very much under debate. At MVP’s Sports Bar & Grill on a weekday afternoon in September, five members of the Butts family — comprising more than a third of the total lunchtime crowd — shake their heads and chortle darkly about how their little city, once again, is getting national media coverage.
“It’s not good coverage, I’ll tell you that,’’ says Betty Butts who, with her husband, Al, a retired Caterpillar employee, has lived here since 1965. “It hurts.’’
Their son, Bill Butts of Leesburg, Fla., who is visiting Decatur for a family wedding, has watched the fingers of blame in the Florida media pointing at his hometown. This was after he had watched the earlier round of stories about Decatur’s controversy over race and school expulsions.
Betty Butts knows how far the stories reach. “I’ve had my brother from Las Vegas call and laugh and say, ‘What the hell’s going on back there?’” she says. “My sister in Kalamazoo, Michigan, says, ‘Well I guess Decatur’s in the headlines again.’”
Leaders say the way to reverse both the reality and perception of the “Decatur curse’’ is to diversify the economy. That could help prevent the city from reeling every time a corporate decision is made in Tokyo or London, or a magazine article appears in New York.
“There’s a lot more white-collar jobs here than there were 20 years ago, but we’re still thought of as a blue-collar community. We’ll have to work hard at remaking ourselves,’’ Sen. Noland says. And hard work, he notes, is something people here understand. “We are a community that makes things. The people of Decatur know how to work.’’
Kevin McDermott, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter based at the Illinois Statehouse, previously wrote for the Decatur Herald & Review.
Illinois Issues, November 2001
