Hope to Heartache: General Motors and the American Dream
The end of General Motors will mark a painful conclusion to a distinctly American story. Forgotten in the collapse will be the millions of people who migrated from South to North to take a chance and build the most successful company yet seen in the history of business. Their lives and the economy of America were transformed by the automobile and the dreams of a steady income. My parents made this difficult choice along with uncountable others who were weary of working the land. The demise of General Motors is more than just the end of a car company and we will be many years measuring the loss.
Daddy's friend Tater Kotch was tired of sharecropping and not having money. Constantly joking and easily distracted, Tater was poorly suited to the business of growing cash crops. The fact that he was tall and lean also made curling over a hoe to chop cotton especially unpleasant and he ran out of patience after just two summers of farming. When he finally made a decision to quit, my father was the first person to get the news.
"I'm leaving, James," he said. "Ain't no future in hoeing rows of cotton and waitin' on rain."
My father took a moment to process what he had just heard and he stared at his friend before he spoke. "Well, you're a farmer, Tater, and your daddy's a farmer and you ain't got no money. What the hell you think you're gonna do?"
"I don't know what I'm gonna do, James. I just know what I ain't gonna do and I ain't gonna chop cotton no more. I reckon I can get me a job somewhere."
"I don't know about no jobs nowhere, Tater," Daddy said. "And I want me a farm. Maybe two more seasons and I'll get a good enough crop to get me my own piece a land."
"Naw, you won't, James. I wish you was but you ain't ever gonna have more 'n enough money to plant again next year and get a little food for your kids until next spring. That's all the hell sharecroppin' is, strugglin' from one year to the next and makin' the landowner money and me and Edie, we're done with it."
"We'll see about that, Tater."
"I reckon we will, James." Tater paused and looked at the sagging gray wood shack where my parents were living. Tarpaper tacked to the roof flapped in a hot July breeze.
"I come to say good-bye, James," Tater continued. "We're leavin'. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact."
"Now how in the hell you leavin'? You got a crop in the field and it's the middle of the summer."
"My daddy's gonna bring it in. He's gonna hire some hands to chop and pick and he'll send me half a what he gets."
"Goddmann, Tater. Where you goin'?"
"Up north. Edie read in the Memphis paper that they's jobs all over creation in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland; all them big cities got factories making stuff now and payin' good wages."
"I'll be damned if I'll ever do that," Daddy said. "I'm havin' me a farm."
"I sure do hope you do, James." Daddy's friend put out his hand and they shook before Tater turned and walked down the dirt two track toward the distant paved road. "I'll send you a post card and let y'all know how we're doin'. Tell Joyce Edie'll try to come by later today to say good bye."
Daddy bent back to his hoe and a dream that was more fragile than he had yet realized. As a business proposition, sharecropping did not provide good odds of acquiring financial independence from the landowner. In fact, sharecropping approximated a modern form of indentured servitude. Prospects were not good for reaching a financial status that enabled a sharecropper to purchase the land he was working. Instead, harvest generally left the tenant grower with barely enough money to feed and clothe his family through the winter and purchase seed for spring planting. In a good year there might be a sufficient number of cotton bales to enable a reasonable profit but tenant farmers generally had to give half of a harvest to the landowner whose soil they had tilled. Unless they gave up and left out of desperation, sharecroppers tended to be stuck in a cycle of repeating financial shortfall that offered little hope for either prosperity or independence. There were, of course, all of those other variables like weather and the price of cotton that added dimensions of even greater risk.
Daddy hung on. Ma, though, had been ready to leave the moment she had arrived in the Mississippi Delta flatlands. Before she came to the American South from Newfoundland, my mother had thought she was going to be living on a plantation with servants who brought her cool drinks as she glided around in hoop skirts and her handsome and gallant husband oversaw the fieldwork on horseback. She told me the uninformed vision she had of Dixie came from the romantic dreams she had acquired as a teenager during a viewing of Gone with the Wind. Unfortunately, Daddy had delivered her to a two room, rotting wooden structure set atop cinderblocks in the middle of a sea of cotton rows. Water came from a hand pump off the back steps and an outhouse had been set over a hole dug in the ground on the edge of the field. Ma said she lay awake every night and watched the stars passing between the gaps in the roof slats and worried that she had made a terrible, irreparable mistake.
"I was scared of the land, too, son," Ma told me. "I had never been anywhere that there weren't some hills. All of that flatness and open country was just frightening. I didn't know what to think of it and we were so alone out there. I should've listened to my mother and never left home."
Ma had not adjusted but she was slowly resigning herself to Daddy's stubbornness. In their fourth year of tenant farming, my father was convinced the bumper crop of cotton bolls and good market prices were likely to provide a cash surplus for a down payment on his own section of land. Ma was unrepentantly doubtful but was sustaining her delicate patience until a large snake crawled out from behind her dinner plates. There were no cupboards in their shack and whoever had lived there previously had nailed wooden produce crates to the wall to create shelves. Ma kept her modest collection of dishes and pans in these crates and when she reached for a plate she disturbed a dark green snake that had curled up inside a cooking pot. She had never seen a snake and screamed loudly enough that Daddy heard her more than a quarter of a mile away at the end of a turn row.
A few days later as he was walking toward the house for lunch, Daddy looked up and saw a shining black car spinning columns of dust out behind its tires as it bounced down a tractor path in his direction. His first reaction was to suspect the wealthy landowner was coming to try to change the terms of their agreement because the summer had produced the fattest cotton bolls in recent memory. As the car drew closer, though, and came to a stop, Daddy recognized the angular face of his friend Tater Kotch. The door of the waxed and buffed car quickly swung open and Tater rose up in a pressed white cotton shirt and slacks with shining brown shoes. Daddy was holding the handle of a hoe as Tater came toward him with his right hand extended.
"Well, I'll be go to hell," Daddy said. "If'n it ain't ol' Tater Kotch."
"Hello, James. How are y'all?"
"We're all right, I reckon. But you look like yer doin' a bit better, ain't ya?"
"Hi Tater." Ma stood at the doorway with her two daughters, Elaine and Bev, clinging to her wrinkled work dress.
"Hello, Joyce. Nice to see you."
"Where's Edie?"
"She's over at mom 'n 'ems'. I said I wanted to run over and see y'all real quick. She wants to come over before we go back north, though."
Because Tater Kotch's visit was a critical moment in my parents' lives, Daddy and Ma remembered the conversation in great detail.
"What you got there, Tater?" Daddy nodded in the direction of the car.
"That's a brand new Buick Roadmaster, James. Ain't she somethin'? Drove her down from Michigan. It's got what they call now DynaFlow."
"Who let you drive a car like that, Tater? Who's it belong to?"
"Belongs to me, James. I'm buyin' from the Buick."
"Like hell it belongs to you. How'd you ever get a car like that?" Daddy asked.
"I told you I done bought it, James," Tater said. "How you reckon I got it? Stole it?"
"Where'd you get that kinda money? Somebody you know die?"
"Naw, James, I didn't inherit nothin'. I got me a job up workin' in one of them car factories. You can make good money up there?"
"How much good money?"
Daddy remained skeptical that Tater or any southern farm boy might ever have a job that made possible such possessions.
"Enough to get me a car like this," Tater said. "Ain't that enough?"
I was doubtful when I first heard this recollection. The scene was too prosaic to be true; the gleaming sedan under the drowsy Arkansas sky, outlined against the faded, unpainted wood of that sharecropper's house. Daddy's memory, though, was convincingly detailed. As the years passed, instead of finding the story improbable, I realized it was almost certainly true and had happened many times across Dixie. There were just too many people who had left the farm after World War II and had gone north to trade certain factory wages for the insecurity of growing crops. No worries about drought or flood were involved in making cars and there was a constant, reliable paycheck every week. The Dixie Disaspora was undoubtedly inclined to return home and display the prosperity earned by leaving the land and going to the assembly lines and foundries of the north.
Almost 50 years later, I happened to read a John Grisham novel that had been recommended to me by a friend who said it sounded like my family. In "A Painted House," Grisham wrote of a boy who came home from Detroit in his new car, attempting to convince his younger relatives to go north and escape the farm. Oddly, Grisham gave this character the nickname "Tater." Daddy was dead by the time the novel was published and Ma had not read a complete book in decades and they had shared their story with several of us children more than thirty years earlier. Tater Kotch had apparently become part of an American archetype that defined an era.
"I didn't pay for that beauty all at once, James," Tater explained. "The factories got a way you can pay a little at a time."
"What's the wages like, Tater?" Daddy asked.
"Depends on what job you get, James. But I know boys that's getting' three, four, and even five dollars an hour with over time."
Daddy did not respond but Ma said Tater kept talking about the new neighborhoods that had risen up out of subdivided farm land and how almost anyone who wanted work had a job and a house and a car and their families ate in restaurants every week. As his friend described this improbable new world, Ma told me Daddy let the hoe fall from his hands.
In a few months, my parents and my two older sisters were climbing aboard a Continental Trailways bus in Marked Tree, Arkansas with tickets for Flint, Michigan. They did not know a solitary person in Flint and had only a remote prospect of sleeping on the floor in the extra room of an apartment owned by a friend of Tater's. Daddy's entire yearly earnings from selling cotton was just over $600.00 and that was all that there was to support his family between the field and the factory. Climbing the steps into that bus was more hopeful than rational.
I have a vivid image of that day in my parents' lives and it makes me feel as if I too lived through its entirety. Daddy is sitting next to the window near the front of the coach with my sister Elaine beside him and Ma and Beverly across the aisle. Ma is excessively energetic and excited about getting away from their daily deprivations in the middle of the cotton patch. She is apprehensive, though, of yet another unknown. Nonetheless, she is enthusiastic about finally beginning an independent existence with her husband and children. In this imaginary tableau, I see Daddy staring quietly at the patchwork of green fields slipping away through his window and down the highway behind the bus, fading in the distance. As the pavement bends eastward toward the great river, my father watches the brown Mississippi, endlessly pulling America southward, flowing in the direction of the homestead he had envisioned, the river spreading its rich sediment and floodwaters across the Delta to fertilize the hopes of some other farm boy still privileged to be working the soil.
Also at http://www.moorethink.com
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Wow, what an excellent read, James!!! It is truly heartbreaking that these automakers can no longer provide "the American Dream". If only the CEO's had not been so stubborn in changing with the times!
The fat lady finally sang. General Motors (GM) is gone at last. Don’t look at the share price, which now trades in pennies, down from $90. Look at the labor force, which has shrunk from 360,000 to 39,000 on its way to 18,000. I sat at Ralph Nader’s knee (because there were no chairs) 40 years ago, who wore his unfashionable trademark white shirt and pencil thin tie. He was fresh from the runaway success of his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which castigated GM for its Corvair, which had the unfortunate tendency to explode when hit from behind. Even then he was predicting the demise of GM. Companies that recklessly kill off their customers and produce inferior products at high prices can’t last, he said. Fuel efficiency and the environment came later. Many people considered him a communist then, for bashing GM was considered unpatriotic by most and treasonable by some. No doubt J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was following his every move. I think that Obama should now make Nader a director of GM, along with that other GM hater, Michael Moore. www.madhedgefundtrader.com
Companies that recklessly kill off their customers and produce inferior products at high prices can"t last -
WRONG.
I can think of a great company that does exactly that.
Altria (then Phillip Morris Intl) is one of the most profitable companies in the world, gushes cash flow. it kills its own customers, but thankfully, more and more people are becoming its customers (although at a lower rate in the US). Hopefully the Asian markets pick up the slack. I hear Korea, Japan and India are the biggest future customers of PM.
The people who develop cancer drugs will be happy to hear that. Smoking is the leading cause for all preventable cancers. The more people smoke, the more people will need chemotherapy to extend their lives by a couple of months.
:-)
Good writing.
It is the last sentence that, even as it describes a mans future unfolding 60 or so years ago, it also heralds our own future now.
"....the brown Mississippi, endlessly pulling America southward, flowing in the direction of the homestead he had envisioned, the river spreading its rich sediment and floodwaters across the Delta to fertilize the hopes of some other farm boy still privileged to be working the soil."
Yes, ironic as it is, we now are moving our hopes towards a simpler life where those who survive will be either working the soil or related to that endeavor.
Ya, exoevolution, there will be a "next great job boom" but it may look more like survival than Utopian fantasy.
Our standard of living is going to continue to go down, as it must, due to the ever shrinking resource base and expanding world population.
Gone is the "non-negotiable" lifestyle of the American dream that takes 25% of the worlds oil to support its 7000 lb vehicles, heating 3000 sq. ft. homes, and our chemical fertilized cheese doodle diet.
There will be better times ahead, YES - we will all have to downsize our CORPORATE spun desires of GREED & OVER CONSUMPTION. No longer using without thought, dead-end fuels like OIL & Coal - which at any price, cost too much in the damage done to the planet & the outrageous cost of BLOOD & TREASURE.
"HAPPINESS", NOT GREED & CONSUMPTION, will be THE GOAL. This is possible with LEADERS that care more for THE PEOPLE than THE CORPORATIONS, "this is key", new leaders that not only "talk" about CHANGE, BUT, actually deliver, THE CHANGE THAT WILL REPLACE THE CURRENT FAILED & "DYING" SYSTEM, that is currently based on GREED & PROFIT FIRST & PEOPLE LAST .
We have found the weapons of mass destruction & they are the GREED FILLED, WARLORD CORPORATIONS, that only serve "their" GOD of ENDLESS, NEVER ENDING, ALWAYS INCREASING "PROFITS", at any human cost. PROFITS, that have in the past been concentrated in the hands of fewer & fewer people in order to continue the SUPREMACY of the WEALTHY!
Smaller cars, smaller houses, smaller bodies, smaller environmental footprints, but more equality & a spreading of wealth to all people throughout the ENTIRE WORLD, that will ultimately help break our #1 addiction, the addiction that is at the root of ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS, our mind numbing insane addiction to WAR! YES - LESS can become MORE, without the waste & destruction, of ENDLESS, MINDLESS WAR!
A world that feds, educates, provides health care &
Maybe another bigger World War will do the trick.
Yeah, MORE WAR - that has always worked out well in the PAST, like the heroin addict that says one more hit will solve his problems!
We MUST break our WAR ADDICTION!!!!!
Great writing!
What will be the next great company or industry to take people away from the new sharecropping jobs of Wal-Mart, McD's, the "service" jobs that no longer provide a living wage??
I think it will take GOVERNMENT backing & Apollo / Manhattan Project type initiatives to spur the NEXT GREAT JOB BOOM that pays a living wage, to once again revive the MIDDLE CLASS - the true backbone of any JUST & FAIR ECONOMY.
If it is solely left to the current GREED FILLED CORPORATIONS - IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN - THE CORPORATIONS are like the landlords of old - keeping the sharecroppers on the hook & at their mercy.
GOVERNMENT involvement is mandatory - CAPITALISM is broken & beyond repair - WE need a new "hybrid" economic system that connects people oriented Socialism, with a less "rabid" form of Capitalism.
PEOPLE over PROFITS. Making PRODUCTS for the 21st CENTURY, creating good paying jobs that can restore the dignity of work, while healing the environment & turning away from the madness of WAR & EMPIRE. That is THE American Dream!
Keep dreaming.
KTM - Keep KILLING the dream!
I will keep dreaming. Dreams really do come true!
The government is the least qualified entity to figure out how to make a profit.
I said - PEOPLE "over" PROFITS!
Excessive CORPORATE Profits - IS THE PROBLEM!
We need to take a NEW APPROACH.
GM is merely reorganizing, not dying. Chapter 11 was designed to help struggling companies get their acts together and reemerge stronger. The biggest drawback to filing bankruptcy reorganization is the fact that those who don't understand the process start planning a company's funeral.
Chapter 11 is designed to rip off stakeholders. Corporations can basically negotiate debt away, they can dishonor contracts they entered into with their employees, they can get rid of pensions etc.. It basically says, "Look at me, I can screw all of you (again) and still live another day!". You go into chapter 11, you might stay in business, but your reputation is invariably that of a con. Want to ask the United employees how they feel about their company? Oh, no, you don't have to. All you have to do is to fly with them... you will notice the difference.
I don't know if you will read this, because the posts are ancient by web standards, BUT...The reason I posted the above was in reaction to a ridiculous, but increasingly ubiquitous, idea that filing Chapter 11 signals the death of a company. I have worked as a bankruptcy attorney, and as such, have found that filing Chapter 11 sometimes signifies a rebirth. You are completely correct in stating that Chapter 11 allows large companies to renegotiate contracts with organized labor, to the detriment of the company's workers. However, in this case I was especially infuriated by the actions of the CEO's to avoid bankruptcy, while simultaneously begging for billions of taxpayer dollars, because they knew that the bankruptcy trustee would cut them first in any bankruptcy proceeding. The bankruptcy trustee is able to renegotiate all contracts, including contracts with those at the top, and that is what the CEO's feared. I believe that Chapter 11 should have been required before any taxpayer money was doled out. First, there should have been a thorough, independent accounting, then a reorganization, then, and only then, a bailout, as needed.
Wait... where does "the most successful company yet seen in the history of business" come from? What, exactly, is the definition of success, here? GM's ranking in the Fortune 500 does not indicate that, at all:
1 Exxon Mobil 442,851.0 45,220.0
2 Wal-Mart Stores 405,607.0 13,400.0
3 Chevron 263,159.0 23,931.0
4 ConocoPhillips 230,764.0 -16,998.0
5 General Electric 183,207.0 17,410.0
6 General Motors 148,979.0 -30,860.0
They are nowhere close to Exxon or Walmart. And one wonders if any of these are "success stories" we really need more of.
You are writing nicely about a myth here. But a myth is all this is.
KTM, you are are my hero !!
Before i read the comments, while i was reading the article, the first thing i thought is this.
GM has or ever had nothin on the following companies.
ExxonMobil
Walmart
Coca Cola Inc.
Proctor & Gamble
Johnson & Johnson
General Electric
Whether you compare brand power or financial strength or quality of management, GM was never ahead of these guys...its a myth, this whole "gm an american icon".
Coke, Pepsi, Phillip Morris, Mcdonalds are bigger american icons than crappy GM (even in its great days) ever was or will be.
Didn't think about Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. Yep. There is more money in carbonated water, cleaning supplies and baby powder than there is in cars. Sad, isn't it? Or... maybe not. Cars are way overrated.
And I would say that companies like Dupont or Dow Chemical are technologically far more important than GM ever was or could have been. There are billions of people who will never own a GM model, but I bet there are very few people in the world who have never come in contact with a product made by Dupont and Dow.
James Moore writes so beautifully on any subject, it's a pleasure to read. This is a beautiful human interest story of hope and belief in the powers of self determination. What a legacy he has inherited and what a gift for putting words together to weave such a beautiful story, his writings are delightful.
Great story. Sad but true, the American Dream is now gone. A working person has nothing left except a life a scraping by, chasing jobs with no hope of security while the wealthy lord over the latest version of the sharecropper. A college degree mean very little, the middle class are becoming the working poor and I don't see much hope that we will ever get back to full employment and a stable society. I hope I'm wrong but I see a lot of politicians who are selling us out so we can go back to the good old days of the 1920's. They are doing everything they can to prevent working people from reaching the middle class. And we are just sitting by and willing to accept it but there are few options out there now. I wonder if Toyota's hiring?
No, it's still a dream. I'm sure they said the same thing when the lamplighters got laid off after electification.
Or the stagecoach drivers, when the public embraced the new technology of automobiles with gasoline engines.
Excellent "tableau" (love that word). I share the feelings of loss, you describe. I too have grown up in the era of “What’s good for General Motors is good for the Country”. I don't think the generations that have followed us can truly understand what our "Manufacturing Might" has meant to this country. The creation of the middle class; The "where-with-all", through our manufacturing abilities, to supply ourselves and our allies the means, with which, to successfully beat back the dark forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan; and there-after to supply jobs to the legions of young men, newly educated through the GI Bill, so they could grow and support their families, as they helped build a country, here-to-for, only imagined.
How far we have fallen; How will we ever get back.
Excellent read James! Sadly most of the people in management never rose up through the ranks and understood the basic values of the people that truly built the companies and got them to the "icon" status.
Some where down the road we lost the understanding of where we came from and what it took to get to the top. As one manager told me proudly "you don't have to know anything to be a manager", looking back, that was a red flag. The computer company I work for is headed in the same direction as GM because just like GM, one manager too many that didn't know how to run a company anywhere but into the ground....
Well said mountainweb!!! All of these car companies should get rid of "dead wood" (their management) and start over with 'new' management that does know how a successful company is run, knows what they're doing, and knows how to innovate for the 21st Century.
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