Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (33 1/3) (9 page)

The area’s reserves of coal and a link on the Erie Canal spawned the iron industry in this Scotch-Irish-settled valley in the Northwest Territory in the nineteenth century. What in 1800 was a town of 8,000 was a steel city of 160,000 by World War II.

At the mill we meet Frank, who came from Italy in 1900. “He doesn’t talk much, but I know how he feels about his kids and grandkids, knowing the satisfaction he gets knowing that they’ll grow up with the same chances as the kid next door or any other kid in the country.” Frank was one of many Southern and Central Europeans who came to work at the mills at the turn of the century. Black and Latino workers and their families arrived at the same time. They all found the Anglo-Saxons openly hostile to their settling, which began the area’s history of ethnic and racial tensions.

The film takes us to Powers Auditorium, a grand stage built in 1931 by the Warner brothers, who were residents of Youngstown before making their fortune. “No professionals
here. They’re all steelworkers and their wives and daughters. The maestro is a timekeeper in the mills, and there’s been plenty of bad jokes about that.” The film passes quickly by the stage but lingers at the mill. Its open hearth is likened to a smoky underworld. The steel glows with no shadow in black and white.

The mills were turned into defense plants during World War II, and my aunt Mary got a job at one. She always remembered how her clothes would catch fire while welding Bailey bridges. She had to dig up her birth certificate to get the job, and that’s how she found out she was born in Canada; her Croatian immigrant parents had traveled north when not running their Buffalo, New York, boarding house. Mary loved talking about welding, how long she had to work and how she was paid like a man, at least until the boys came home. With the money she earned she bought her mother a house, since they had been evicted from every place they lived, including the Monkey’s Nest, an ethnic ghetto remembered fondly but referred to at the time as “a collection of miserable hovels in the grime of an industrial area between a bend of the river and a railroad.”
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My grandfather’s birth certificate never mattered: he used his older brother Frank’s to get a job at a mill when he was 14. It wasn’t until I was an adult, and he was long dead of lung cancer, that I found out his name wasn’t Frank.

In the fifties, the nation’s steel production was in full swing, and Youngstown had its golden era. Two local real estate developers, Edward J. DeBartolo and William M. Cafaro, used former farm areas near the city to test new retail concepts—the strip mall and the enclosed mall—before unleashing them on the region, the country, and then the world. Between 1949 and 1954, some 17,000 people flocked to the new suburbs surrounding the city’s manufacturing hub.
Ethnic and class tensions were mapped onto the suburbs, with each—Boardman, Canfield, Poland, and Austintown—taking on a different rank in the social ladder. My mother grew up in a first ring suburb. Her memories of childhood mornings recall skies tainted orange with mill smoke.

In 1965, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company made the promotional film
A Letter to Youngstown
,
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in which a 7-year-old boy, Tommy, asks his grandfather for a bike for his birthday. Instead he gets stock in the mill. When Tommy complains, the grandfather takes him to see his present. At the mill’s corporate headquarters, Tommy asks, “What do we make here?” to which the grandfather replies, “Decisions, mostly. The men who run the mind of the mill work here.” We learn that the company, along with United and Republic Steel, make Youngstown the seventh largest steel-production site in the U.S. Tommy and his grandfather tour the control room, where a man sits watching “checkpoints monitored into an electronic computer which instantly figures the optimum combination of materials, speeds, temperatures, and so on for the best possible product.” Tommy is impressed. And he still gets a bike, with a body made of steel.

My dad wanted to invest money from his newspaper route and asked his grandfather to help. He wanted to buy stock in McDonald’s, Disney, and Mack Trucks. “No, you should buy something that will last,” his grandfather said. They both bought heavily into U.S. Steel, lost a fortune, and never invested in the market again. My dad pushed a broom at the mills for two years, but only as a summer job during college, until he earned a Ph.D. We moved where his job took us, which was away from Ohio.

My parents graduated high school in 1965. They went to the prom together. My mom talks fondly about the city at that time, although in 1963 the
Saturday Evening Post
called
it “Crime Town U.S.A.” She laughs about how everyone “played the bug,” the numbers, and says that winnings from it were the only way her family would get little extras. She even laughs when she recalls how all the windows were blown out of uptown stores after a mob car bomb exploded on the street. “And then there was a retaliation house bomb …”

A bad corporate merger in 1969 left Youngstown Sheet and Tube in serious debt. The mills spewed out major pollutants, and working conditions became increasingly unsafe as machinery aged. The city’s downtown went ghost as the suburbs’ malls beckoned. Then came September 19, 1977, “Black Monday,” when 4,100 workers at the Campbell Works plant of Youngstown Sheet and Tube lost their jobs. It was the first major steel-plant shutdown in the country. Brier Hill Works followed in 1978, then U.S. Steel–McDonald, Ohio, in 1980, and Republic Steel in 1981. Twenty-five thousand area jobs were lost. The community tried to fight back: workers and local clergy formed the Ecumenical Coalition of Youngstown to try to buy the mills and run them collectively. They failed.

The media dubbed Youngstown the poster child for deindustrialization, beginning a national trend of “widespread, systematic disinvestment in the nation’s basic productive capacity”
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that swept the U.S. in the 1980s. Workers spoke of betrayal, of the moral economy of manufacturing, of corporate greed and decisions made by men in little rooms that affected the life and death of a city. The legend of local politician Jim Traficant began at this time. When he was sheriff during the mill closings, he refused to evict unemployed families. People never forgot this kindness and elected him as Youngstown’s representative to Congress in 1985.

The Labor Museum librarian helped me sift through newspapers from the years after the closings. She showed me
ads for social organizations that sought to provide psychological counseling for the laid-off workers, but she explained that many were too proud to seek help. She showed me obituaries: men in their 40s dying of heart attacks or strokes. And she reminded me that there were things the papers didn’t often report, like alcoholism and domestic violence. The church was the one place someone could receive help without it seeming like a handout, and the needy faithful swelled. But many men would rather kill themselves, the librarian assured me, than take any help at all. A wife would say there was no money, and the husband would go out looking for work and never come home.

In the museum archive is a home movie that was shot on October 25, 1989, five days after
Pretty Hate Machine
was released. In the video a man carries a camcorder around abandoned lots and climbs the structures of the mills where he once worked.
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In the 70 minutes of the movie he utters only one word: “Unbelievable.”

In 1983, the
Wall Street Journal
called the Youngstown-Warren area a “necropolis”;
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in the 1980s, mental-health officials recorded three times more cases of depression, spousal abuse, addiction, divorce, and suicide than the national average. By the mid-1980s, Youngstown’s lack of capital meant a breakdown in the city’s fabric, including schools, roads, and social services. Youngstown became a national leader in unemployment, poverty rates, population decline, devaluation of housing stock, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and arsons. The industrial core of the Midwest was becoming the Rust Belt.

In the midst of this, my parents divorced, and my mother and I returned to live in Youngstown with my grandmother. Although my mother had a college degree—the first in her family—she couldn’t find a good job, and we began
to sink. The year of our move, at the age of 6, I heard my grandmother say I was “white” and that she wouldn’t like it if I made friends with her neighbors, who were “not—.” I didn’t know it mattered, but the longer I was in Youngstown, the more I understood that it did matter to her. Still, maybe defiantly, I made friends.

I went to a Catholic elementary school, where I prayed and prayed and sang in the choir. I remember being dimly aware that my family was stretched thin and that our neighborhood was rough, but I didn’t know that I had been a hypochondriac who hid out in the nurse’s office for weeks. My mother mentioned it recently, and now I wonder what happened. Maybe there is a file somewhere that could tell me—was I a troubled kid, or just trouble? In 1988, we sold the house and moved to the suburbs. I left my old friends and entered a de facto segregated school system, where I understood that our slender means and inner-city past made me different. I tried desperately to fit in, until the day I saw the video for “Creep.” It was the best shock.

A 1994 promotional video for WCI Steel boasts of its $200 million modernizations to 1,300 acres of steel-production facilities a bit north in Warren, Ohio.
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The buzzwords for its products “precision and flexibility”. “Sophistication is critical at WCI. All critical processes are computer-controlled.” Steel made in a smokestackless facility takes roughly one labor hour for every 100 it would have required a century ago. These types of factories dot the Midwest today, and indeed my senior prom date works at one now. They are clean, modern, and efficient, and employ very few people.

I began high school in the fall of 1993, and by the end of my sophomore year, I was on my first computer BBS, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity,” chatting away while listening to
Nine Inch Nails. I got a job at DeBartolo’s Southern Park Mall but was fired from Chick-a-slinging for not upselling fries to a friend. Or perhaps it was because that same day, I told my boss that I didn’t like that our company supported anti-choice Christian charities like Focus on the Family.

Once free from the mall, I became more openly rebellious in look and spirit, excited by the inklings of a better world I’d found through the Cleveland alt radio station, on
120 Minutes
, at the record store, and via the zine network I found while visiting my dad. In these glimpses I saw a way out, someplace more like who I was. That Trent, a nerdy piano player from 30 miles away, had managed to get out and do something made the idea seem vaguely possible.

One of my interviewees for this book joked about a bar downtown that had a sign that read “Youngstown—All the Crime, Corruption, and Drugs of New York at Half the Price.” In 1995, the city earned a new superlative, “murder capital of the United States,” and it always ranks high on all manner of “Top 10 Cities Least Likely to Recover From Economic Despair” lists (never reaching No. 1 or 2, thanks to Gary, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan). The most significant increase in crime occurred 15 years after the mill closings, when the children of former mill workers came of age in broken homes, with no opportunities, amid the rampant drug dealing and endemic corruption that hindered any true rule of law. Bruce Springsteen released
The Ghost of Tom Joad
in 1995, which includes the song “Youngstown,” and came to town to pay homage to our noble misery at a concert in one of the old glorious ballrooms built by long-dead magnates. My friends couldn’t care less: who was this old man singing about our town, anyway? That was the second year of NIN’s Self Destruct tour, and we had our own way of dealing with things.

The “sweet Jenny” of Springsteen’s “Youngstown” was the Jeanette blast furnace that had been in operation between 1918 and 1977, and which some community members had been trying to turn into a monument since the eighties. H. William Lawson, the head of the local historical society, said an exhibit would be better on site than at the quarters of the Labor Museum because “there’s something that’s romantic and mythical to what those [steelworkers] were doing … and you can’t give an accurate presence of that under a roof.”
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Following a reported lack of interest and complications in stabilizing the location, the 500-ton structure with 90-foot stacks was torn down in January 1997. The director of applied history at Youngstown State University, Donna DeBlasio, called it an “erasure.”
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I left Youngstown that May and didn’t think about the city again until a college professor asked me how living in a major working-class city had shaped my ideas about social justice. At the time, I had no answer. No one I knew in Youngstown—teachers, family members, friends—had ever talked about it in that way. I’d never stepped foot in the Labor Museum. I walked out of the meeting stunned, angry, and ashamed of myself. That’s when my research for a book about growing up in the postindustrial Midwest began, although the subject of Nine Inch Nails lay dormant until the concept of the 33 1/3 series was brought to my attention by a friend. It was obvious that Nine Inch Nails would be my choice for a topic, but it would mean a lot of research about the band’s later career. In college I was ashamed of my former Nails fandom, its naive intensity, and the band’s mainstream status. Luckily, I grew up enough to get over such divisions, and began work on the book just as Reznor himself went indie.

Around the time I left Youngstown, something unprecedented began to happen: guilty verdicts on corruption
charges were handed down to the city’s elite. In 1995, local discount-chain entrepreneur Mickey Monus was convicted on 109 federal counts and got 19 years in prison, having cheated investors out of $1 billion. In 1998, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., son of the mall magnate, testified against former Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards, who had extorted money from DeBartolo to secure a casino license. DeBartolo Jr. got a $1 million fine and one year of probation for concealing the crime. In 2000, Youngstown was revealed to be the site of a three-year covert FBI operation that led to 70 convictions, including “the outgoing prosecutor, the sheriff, the county engineer, members of the local police force, a city law director, several defense attorneys, politicians, judges, and a former assistant U.S. Attorney,” according to
The New Republic
, leading the magazine to describe Youngstown as a place where “residents had grown so used to a culture of corruption that they viewed it casually, even proudly; a place, in a sliver of America, where a malignant way of life was left largely untouched for almost 100 years.”
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Two years later, Jim Traficant, who had been a thorn in the Democrats’ side throughout his 18 years of Congress, was convicted on 10 felony counts and expelled from Congress. He received 27,000 votes in the next election, in which he ran as an independent from the Allenwood Federal Correctional Institution. Some 1,200 people cheered him at the “Welcome Home, Jimbo” party held upon his September 2009 release.
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