The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

The Church and Globalization

When I wrote my book on globalization and the Midwest, I devoted a great deal of space to the people and institutions -- governments, mayors, planners, universities, newspapers -- whose job it is to deal with the problem and solve it. I made no mention of churches or religion, and this was a mistake.  I heard quickly from both pastors and laity, letting me know that the Midwest's problems are the church's problems too, and they want a voice in this debate.

That voice took shape recently at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, located on the Northwestern University campus in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Garrett sponsored a three-day conference on "Ethical Leadership, the Church and the Global Economy." Ethical leadership and the church are well outside my area of expertise, but they invited me to sit in and I'm glad I did.

The attendees were mostly Midwesterners -- bishops, pastors, theologians. They live in the same Midwest as the rest of us and feel the same economic impact -- emptying cities, crumbling old factory towns, dying rural areas, brain drains. Even more than the rest of us, they have to deal with the human fallout -- families coping with unemployment, the pain of shattered dreams, the divorces and drinking and dropouts and drugs that are the pathologies of economic decline. On top of that, they live in shrinking cities and so see their own churches shrinking, their pews emptying, their parishioners leaving. They live on budgets, too, and have to deal with leaky roofs and broken boilers in churches they can't afford to keep up.

Most of all, they have to guide congregations that have lost their way in this world. What do you tell them? Do you hold their hands and succor them in their pain? Do you tell them to fight back? If so, how? Do you preach acceptance or fury? Most of all, how do you help people understand economic turmoil, when your own education left you with a stronger grip on theology than on economics?

As one speaker said, we are at the intersection where economics and consciousness meet. The church, in a sense, is the traffic cop at that intersection. So how does it cope?

It's clear that this is a discussion that's just begun. The Garrett conferees came to no firm conclusions. But they were talking about the right issues, asking the right questions, staking their claim to this debate. It's clear that, in the Midwest, globalization's impact is running far ahead of our ability to cope with it, and the church can't sit on the sidelines.

The church teaches the eternal verities, which can be both comforting and limiting in a time of wrenching change. "Is Christianity helping people to cope with this change?" one bishop asked, and then concluded that it wasn't. Too often, this bishop said, churchgoers themselves want "to keep our church a good-news resting place."

But that too often means "rest," as in "rest in peace." Instead, she said, churches have to shake people up, stir the pot. Change is with us, especially demographic change in some of the whitest and most conservative parts of America. The Midwest is different now, and Midwesterners, including Midwest Christians, have to be "different," too, or get left behind.

One speaker, an academic, argued that the church's mandate to "love thy neighbor" means, in a global age, loving all people everywhere. But this seemed to disarm Christians for any sort of global competition, leaving them content to celebrate advances abroad, even at a time of local loss. In this view, church teaching dictates that the market must be allowed to have its way. 

But the general feeling at the conference seemed to be that God helps those who help themselves. "Much of the church as we know it in the Midwest has been lost," another bishop said. If the church is to be relevant in this time of turmoil, it must go beyond comforting the wounded and be a leader in rebuilding lives.

But there's a problem here, as one of the theologians commented. Seminaries provide little teaching in economics, so their graduates are as adrift as their parishioners when it comes time to understand economic change and try to guide it. 

If churches are going to reach out to other civic leaders, they also much reach out to themselves. The kind of Balkanization that keeps Midwesterners from working together seems to afflict churches, too. Even individual churches that are shrinking seem disinclined to merge with other churches: old loyalties still trump common sense.

In addition, I couldn't help noticing that this Garrett conference was a gathering of Methodists. Nothing wrong with Methodists, but the Catholics, Presbyterians and Baptists have an equal stake in this global era, not to mention the Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. The Methodists might have something to learn from a little ecumenical economics, and vice versa. 

What I heard at this conference were good people agonizing over a new world for which their training has not prepared them. The realities of globalization, the temporal impact of economic change, are here and affect the lives of their people on a daily basis. They must be faced. If churches are to have value, they must enter the arena.

But if religious faith is to have value, it has to rise above the temporal and the mundane, must use the timeless stories and truths as a guide to a life beyond the daily grind.

Globalization is real, these believers said. So is faith. Each must respect the other. But this means a search for a new crossroads, and this is what the Garrett conferees were seeking. I came away with the feeling that their search has just begun. 

Certainly, the creation of a new economics and a new politics is too important to be left to just the economists and the politicians. Many of the issues facing the Midwest are moral and ethical questions -- not just the rebuilding of our society but what kind of society do we want. If we're entering a new economy, whom should that economy serve?

It is right to hope, one bishop said. He recalled that he was a 10-year-old boy in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and ignited the civil rights movement. For him, this was personal. His father, a mechanic, worked for that very same bus company. Occasionally, he said, his father would take him to work and let him change the signs in the bus, including the ones instructing "coloreds" to move to the rear.

If the South can change that much in his lifetime, he said, who knows what changes await the Midwest? 

Some Straws in the Wind

It's been a long time coming but the Midwest may finally be joining the clean-energy era.

Not that we're all going green, or that the region's tired old factory towns are suddenly blossoming with producers of clean-energy technology. But a scattering of news from around the Midwest makes it clear that, at last, something is happening.

Up in Michigan, the state has awarded Dow Chemical Co. incentives that will leverage $1 billion in investments for three alternative energy projects, including solar roof shingles, that they hope will create 2,500 jobs. Newton, Iowa, the town created and abandoned by Maytag, is trying to recover on the strength of two factories making parts for wind turbines. A wind farm in north central Iowa is about to supply electricty for parts of Wisconsin. Everywhere, clusters of turbines march like giant windmills across Midwestern farms.

Most recently, Milwaukee announced it had landed a Spanish-owned factory to make electric motors for wind turbine generators. The factory, owned by Spain's Ingeteam, is expected to provide 50 to 60 jobs within a year and, with luck, 275 jobs by 2015.

The Canadians want to put 700 wind turbines in the water on their side of Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. Eventually, the turbines will generate power that could fuel industry on both sides of the border. Right now, though, the proposal is generating mostly protests from local NIMBYs who fear the turbines will spoil their view.

In the meantime, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has issued a new report that triples the estimate of potential wind power that could be generated in the U.S. Of the top 10 state for wind energy potential, it says, five -- Kansas, Nebraska, the two Dakotas and Iowa -- are Midwestern.

I'm not sure what this adds up to. But it's obvious that clean energy, as a generator of jobs and investment, has moved beyond the talking stage and is beginning to impact the Midwestern economy. It's also obvious that this has just begun, and there's a lot more activity to come.

In Memoriam: Graham Hovey

They don't make them any more like Graham Hovey, and never will. The Midwest is the poorer for that fact.

Graham died last Saturday, aged 94, after a life of adventure, journalism and scholarship, much of it in service to the Midwest. He was an Iowan, born in Cedar Falls, attended what is now the University of Northern Iowa and later the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Waterloo Daily Courier and then for the old International News Service, first in Detroit and then, when World War II broke out, across northern Africa and into Italy and France, where he broke the story of the Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

After the war, he came back to teach journalism at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin. But daily journalism was in his blood and, in 1956, he joined the staffs of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, now merged into one paper. In 1959, the papers sent him to London, where he covered Europe for seven years, eventually returning to the U.S. to become an editorial writer and, later, Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He ended his career at the University of Michigan running the famous Michigan Journalism Fellows program, an on-campus year for working journalists.

I knew Graham during his London years. Basically, he was what we young reporters wanted to be when we grew up -- an erudite and sophisticated man, armed with a reporter's instincts and equipped by experience and scholarship to dig beneath the news to unearth its meaning and significance. He seemed the very model of the scholarly journalist.

And he did all this for a Midwestern paper. Graham worked at a time when many Midwestern papers routinely kept correspondents around the world. These men and women worked for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Cleveland, even Toledo. Along with the star-spangled Chicago Daily News lineup, he was the best of the best, but almost every big Midwestern newspaper felt an obligation to bring the news of the world to their readers.

All gone now. The Chicago Tribune was the last Midwestern newspaper with its own foreign service. The Star-Tribune and other papers threw in the towel years ago. Graham and many of the others flourished in an era of the strong dollar, when it cost relatively little to keep correspondents overseas. The rest fell victim to the more recent economic squeeze on papers and the shrinking of their coverage to little more than locally-focused news-you-can-use. At a time when the Midwest is more directly affected by global pressures than ever before, almost no Midwestern paper even tries to tell its readers what's happening to their lives.

Graham Hovey symbolized a time -- long before cable, before the Web and Twitter and instant communications -- when Midwestern papers upheld their constitutional mandate to create an informed electorate, and employed journalists like Graham to make this happen. He was, literally, the end of an era and that era passed before he did.

Who Cares?

I spoke last week to some of Chicago's brightest young people -- business folk, academics, an architect, a government type or two -- picked for a program for the city's future leaders. My subject was the Midwest and its response to globalization: in other words, if Chicago is the capital of the Midwest, how goes its inland nation? Too much of the Midwest, I told them, is coping badly with globalization. In fact, some of its big cities (Detroit, Cleveland) and old factory towns (Rockford, Muncie, Lima, Flint) might not make it. If they don't reinvent themselves, I said, they may be doomed to keep sliding into impoverished backwaters. A lot of old farm towns are already there and also might not come back.

Nobody seemed happy about this news. But some of these young people had a question: so what? Why should we care? Throughout history, towns and cities have come and gone. If Muncie goes, why should anyone in Chicago care? If Detroit keeps crumbling, should we do anything about it? More to the point, should we be expected to do anything about it? In a world of limited economic resources, why should we even consider spending some of those resources on places that have lost their economic purpose and show no sign of finding a new one? The Midwest's future, they said, depends on the strength of its winners -- Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Madison, Ann Arbor -- not on succoring its losers.

So if yesterday's cities vanish, why should tomorrow's leaders care?

A good question that deserves an answer, and I'm not sure I've got one. But at the least, we can talk about it a bit, and see if anyone can give a good reason.

The Ax Comes to Academia

Today's award for Valor Under Fire goes to a Task Force at the University of Iowa which set out to evaluate which graduate programs were first-rate, which were so-so and which could be scrubbed without damage to that state's intellectual reputation. The Task Force's report is just in and is a fascinating document, both for what it says and for where it fears to tread. 

First, the Task Force produced its report in about a year -- licketysplit by the standards of academia, where no issue is so trivial that it can't be debated to death. A similar report at the University of Idaho marinated for four years.

Second, the Task Force raised the bar for academic euphemisms. The report, which is meant to identify bad programs, was entitled "Selective Excellence." Of the 111 programs studied, 14 programs were first called "weak." But the authors decided that "weak" was too strong and wrote instead that these programs "require additional evaluation." Overall, it said, Iowa's graduate programs "are doing a very good job." Actually, the rankings themselves rated only 60 programs, about 55 percent, as better than average. 

Now, the hard part begins -- getting rid of the poorer programs, by closing them down or merging them into other programs. Professors battling for their disciplines -- and not incidentally, their jobs -- will take to the barricades. According to the Chronicle on Higher Education, one faculty member has already sent emails saying that proposed cutbacks in a program on China was motivated by racism, not by the fact that few students were signing up for the course.

When it comes to sacrifices for the greater good, most university faculties make the U.S. Senate look as collegial as the Three Musketeers. 

States III: What Can We Do?

The Industrial Age that created the American Midwest is ending. The Global Era that will define its future is beginning. It took decades of industrial growth and investment to make the Midwest the economic powerhouse it once was. It's taken three or four more decades, from the 1960s on, to humble the Midwest and turn it into the economic backwater it is now.

In other words, the Midwest's problems didn't arise yesterday and they won't be solved tomorrow. But enough Midwesterners recognize the depth of these problems that it's not too soon to start thinking about solutions. The Global Age will be around for a century. If it took decades to make us the way we are, it will take more decades to change into the way we'll be -- or should be. 

The key solution will be a new role for the Midwestern states, a new relationship between states and cities, a new way of governing ourselves that meets the new needs of this new era.

Previous posts (here and here) described the incompetence of state governments and the reasons, many of them rooted in the states' very history, for this incompetence. But these posts also noted that the federal system is here to stay. The states aren't going to go away.

The solution is to leave to the states the chores they can still do best, while encouraging them to delegate functions to others who can do them better.

The first imperative is to abandon the habit of looking to state capitals for all solutions. States now control so much public life -- over cities, schools, universities, infrastructure, taxation and other finances -- that almost nothing can be done unless the state capital signs off on it. But states, as we've seen, just don't have the money anymore to do this job. The recession has underlined this fact, but the end of the recession won't change it. This means that all these players -- cities, schools, highways, taxpayers -- get short-changed. If anything is to change, Midwesterners first have to break the habit of looking to state capitals for both money and permission. 

Trade and the Midwest

If there is one core belief that unites American economists, it is the theology of free trade. Almost all economists -- left or right, liberal or conservative, Berkeley or Chicago or MIT -- learn as undergrads that trade between nations is an unblemished blessing and the freer the trade, the better. Economists -- and the politicians and editorial writers who listen to them -- hold this belief almost as gospel. Anyone who disagrees is immediately labled a "protectionist." End of argument.

That's changing. It's changing from the top, among academic economists. It's changing from the bottom, among workers -- especially Midwestern workers -- who have to live with the results of trade. And it's changing among politicians, who are the people who have to approve trade agreements -- that is, to put this gospel into practice.  

In other words, we're seeing a change in the conventional wisdom, and no one knows yet where it will lead. 

At the recent Davos conference, Larry Summers, the chief economic adviser to President Obama, reported that one in five American men of working age is now out of work. He said employment rates had been around 95 percent back in the 1960s, when the free trade orthodoxy took root. Summers didn't call for an end to trade. But he did note that Paul Samuelson, his uncle and the intellectual godfather of American economists, had argued that free trade doesn't work when we are trading with countries that practice protectionist or mercantilist policies. We learned this with the Japanese in the 1980s. Summers was referring to the Chinese. The message: that unless China eases its own trade policies, the U.S. will be justified in slapping new barriers on imports from China.

A couple of weeks earlier, Paul Krugman made roughly the same argument in his column in the New York Times. Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, said that China's trade policies -- especially its insistence on keeping its currency cheap -- could cost 1.4 million jobs. Krugman also quoted Samuelson, to the effect that free trade only works and is only politically acceptable in times of full employment. In times of high unemployment, he said, it's perfectly legitimate to put limits on exports from mercantilist countries like China.

States II: The Roots of Dysfunction

There's a reason why Midwestern states don't make any sense in the global age. The reason is that they've never made any sense. For a couple of centuries, this wasn't crippling. Now it is.

A recent post discussed the incompetence of Midwestern states in dealing for with the crises of the current recession and with the Midwest's long-term needs -- economic, educational, social. It accepted the obvious, that these states aren't going to go away, that the United States is a federal system based on the 50 states. But it also said that if we rely on these states and their governments to create our future, we won't have a future.

Future posts will puzzle over possible solutions. For the moment, though, let's talk about how we got into this jam.

Midwestern states were artifical and arbitrary, even before they were states. Most of the Midwest -- from the Ohio River to Canada and west to the Mississippi River -- emerged from the Northwest Territory, decreed by Congress in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The rest became part of the United States 16 years later, with the Louisiana Purchase.

At the time, this region was mostly unsettled. But the Northwest Ordinance decreed that the Territory could divide itself up into "not less than three nor more than five states," when it had enough people to form states. The Ordinance went further -- it dictated where these state lines would be drawn.

This is how we got Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. Part of the Territory became part of Minnesota. Later parts ofthe Louisiana Purchase became Missouri, Iowa and the rest of Minnesota, plus 11 other states, including the Plains states.

Thanks For Nothing

President Obama, it seems, has just stiffed Illinois and the Midwest on high-speed rail. A lot of people hereabouts will be crying over this let-down. The rest of us -- people who really care about the long-term future of the region -- should send the president a big thank-you card.

Obama, coming off his State of the Union message, went to Tampa, Florida, to announce $8 billion in grants to develop the first American high-speed, intercity rail service -- basically 13 separate "rail corridors" between major cities. The president said this would be a big job-creator. At least 30 rail manufacturers are bidding for contracts, he said.

Of this money, Illinois is to get about $1.23 billion, to start building a line between Chicago and St. Louis -- actually, mostly tracks and other infrastructure between Alton, outside St. Louis, and Dwight, south of Chicago. Wisconsin is to get another $823 million for a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison project.

This sounds like a lot of money. It also sounds like a victory for both Illinois and Wisconsin, two hard-hit states who need all the federal funds they can get. Actually, it's both a defeat and a victory.

It's a defeat for Illinois officials, including Gov. Pat Quinn, who had hoped to get about twice as much -- $2 billion to $2.5 billion -- to start work on passenger service between Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and other cities. The state's application had asked for $4.5 billion.The actual money is much less.

But it's a victory for more far-sighted people who know that the plans Quinn and others had in mind that would lock Illinois and the Midwest into a Toonerville Trolley system, a 110-miles-per-hour version of the true high-speed rail that much of the rest of the world, from China to France, already has in place. 

The Midwest's Broken States

The incompetence of state governments is central to everything that ails the Midwest. States aren't going to go away. The federal system is not about to be repealed. But reams of studies, data, evidence and headlines shows that, in an era of global competition, Midwestern states do much more to hurt than help the people who live within them

What can we do to state government, or for state government, or with state government? Maybe nothing.

So what then? Can the Midwest shake off the Balkanization of the region into a warring league of states and start framing regional policies that don't depend on the whims or desperation of parochical, cash-strapped and overwhelmed governors and legislators?

This is the theme for several future postings on this blog. Indeed, it is the framework for most of what ails the Midwest. All this will point to the big question, which is: How can we move beyond an outmoded economic and political system created by a vanished past and set up new structure competent to deal with an entirely different future? 

If states aren't going to go away, can we work around them? Can they be marginalized, left to some important chores, like fixing state roads, running state parks, managing state prisons, overseeing delivery of services, like unemployment pay to the many citizens hurt by the collapse of the Midwest's  economy.