The Audacity of Hope

Shanghai as in California. And over the long term, David explained, that could spell
trouble for the U.S. economy.
“We’ll be able to keep attracting talent,” he said, “because we’re so well branded. But
for the start-ups, some of the less established companies, the next Google, who knows?
I just hope somebody in Washington understands how competitive things have become.
Our dominance isn’t inevitable.”
AROUND THE SAME time that I visited Google, I took another trip that made me
think about what was happening with the economy. This one was by car, not jet, along
miles of empty highway, to a town called Galesburg, forty-five minutes or so from the
Iowa border in western Illinois.
Founded in 1836, Galesburg had begun as a college town when a group of Presbyterian
and Congregational ministers in New York decided to bring their blend of social reform
and practical education to the Western frontier. The resulting school, Knox College,
became a hotbed of abolitionist activity before the Civil War—a branch of the
Underground Railroad had run through Galesburg, and Hiram Revels, the nation’s first
black U.S. senator, attended the college’s prep school before moving back to
Mississippi. In 1854, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad line was completed
through Galesburg, causing a boom in the region’s commerce. And four years later,
some ten thousand people gathered to hear the fifth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates,
during which Lincoln first framed his opposition to slavery as a moral issue.
It wasn’t this rich history, though, that had taken me to Galesburg. Instead, I’d gone to
meet with a group of union leaders from the Maytag plant, for the company had
announced plans to lay off 1,600 employees and shift operations to Mexico. Like towns
all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded by the shift of
manufacturing overseas. In the previous few years, the town had lost industrial parts
makers and a rubber-hose manufacturer; it was now in the process of seeing Butler
Manufacturing, a steelmaker recently bought by Australians, shutter its doors. Already,
Galesburg’s unemployment rate hovered near 8 percent. With the Maytag plant’s
closing, the town stood to lose another 5 to 10 percent of its entire employment base.
Inside the machinists’ union hall, seven or eight men and two or three women had
gathered on metal folding chairs, talking in muted voices, a few smoking cigarettes,
most of them in their late forties or early fifties, all of them dressed in jeans or khakis,
T-shirts or plaid work shirts. The union president, Dave Bevard, was a big, barrelchested
man in his mid-fifties, with a dark beard, tinted glasses, and a fedora that made
him look like a member of the band ZZ Top. He explained that the union had tried
every possible tactic to get Maytag to change its mind—talking to the press, contacting
shareholders, soliciting support from local and state officials. The Maytag management
had been unmoved.
“It ain’t like these guys aren’t making a profit,” Dave told me. “And if you ask ’em,
they’ll tell you we’re one of the most productive plants in the company. Quality
workmanship. Low error rates. We’ve taken cuts in pay, cuts in benefits, layoffs. The
state and the city have given Maytag at least $10 million in tax breaks over the last eight