The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (14 page)

Carter was a commercial builder in Kernersville, a little tobacco auction town between
Greensboro and Winston-Salem. After meeting Dean, he agreed to build the truck stop
in Martinsville. But Carter was also one of the most spiritual people Dean had ever
met, always seeking after the things that you couldn’t see. He gave Dean a book called
Think and Grow Rich
, written by a man named Napoleon Hill and published in 1937. Dean must have read
it twenty-five times without putting it down.

Napoleon Hill was born in 1883, in a one-room cabin in the Appalachians of southwestern
Virginia. As a young man he became a reporter, and in 1908 he went to Pittsburgh to
interview Andrew Carnegie on assignment for
Success
magazine. The interview was supposed to last three hours, but Carnegie kept Hill
at his house for three days, talking about the principles of life that had made him
the richest man in the world and about the need for a new economic philosophy that
would allow other men to become successful. On the third day, Carnegie said, “If I
commission you to become the author of this philosophy, give you letters of introduction
to men whose experiences you will need”—he mentioned titans of industry such as Henry
Ford, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller—“are you willing to put in twenty years
of research, because that’s how long it will take, and pay your own way as you go
along, without any subsidy from me? Yes or no?” Hill thought about it for twenty-nine
seconds and said yes. Carnegie was timing him with a pocket watch under his desk,
and if Hill’s answer had taken more than a minute, Carnegie would have withdrawn the
offer.

For the next two decades, drawing on Carnegie’s contacts, Napoleon Hill interviewed
more than five hundred of the most successful men of his age—not just industrialists
like Ford and Rockefeller, but politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson,
the inventor Wilbur Wright, the department store magnate F. W. Woolworth, the trial
lawyer Clarence Darrow. “He went from one adversity to the next,” Dean said. “His
son was born with no ears, and Napoleon refused to believe that his son would not
be able to hear. Every night, he would go in before his son went to bed, he would
talk to him like for an hour, and he would tell him, ‘You will hear, one day in your
life you’re going to hear, you’ve got to believe you’re going to hear.’ When his son
was older, he came to hear. He willed it.”

In 1928, Hill published his findings in several volumes under the title
The Law of Success
. A decade later, after a stint advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he gathered
its sixteen lessons in the single volume
Think and Grow Rich.
What Hill called the Philosophy of Achievement began and ended with the mind. Getting
rich was a matter of wanting to be rich, wanting it with “a white heat of desire,”
teaching yourself to imagine wealth as specifically as possible, learning to concentrate
your mind on the desired goal and the means, and to eliminate besetting fears and
other negative thoughts. These were lessons that Americans, living under a system
of capitalism and democracy, were uniquely equipped to apply in their lives. More
than half a century later, Napoleon Hill’s message reached Dean Price and became an
invisible but powerful force in his life, like gravity or love.

“When I was growing up and there was ever a problem,” Dean said, “Mom and Dad would
say, ‘Well, just pray about it.’ I couldn’t buy into that. There had to be something
more. What Napoleon Hill taught me was there’s magical power in your mind that probably
one in a million even fathom that they have. Napoleon’s famous quote is ‘If you can
conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.’ If your imagination can come up with
it, then that means it’s possible. That’s the way nature works. Whether you have the
persistence, determination, dedication to see it through—that’s a different story.”

Dean absorbed
Think and Grow Rich
so completely that he began referring to it as often and as naturally as a minister
quotes the Bible. For every situation he encountered, the book articulated a truth.
“Napoleon once said the best thing that a leader can give the people is hope.” “Napoleon
Hill talks about men wanting to prey on other men financially. If they can’t do it
physically, then they prey on each other financially, and it’s innate, it’s in our
genes—instead of being our brother’s keeper.” “Napoleon Hill, he has a saying—for
every adversity that comes into your life, there is a seed of equal benefit to it.”
“Napoleon Hill wrote that sometimes your subconscious is a few years ahead.”

Hill explained to his readers how to train the subconscious mind with “auto-suggestion”
by concentrating their thoughts before they went to sleep. Every night they should
repeat aloud, like an incantation, a written statement of the amount of money they
wanted to make, the date by which they wanted to have it, and the work they intended
to do to make it. Night after night, Dean lay in bed and faithfully followed Hill’s
instructions before falling asleep.

Hill also warned against the six basic fears. First and strongest of them was the
fear of poverty, which had most of the country in its grip during the years leading
up to the publication of
Think and Grow Rich
. “The people of America began to think of poverty, following the Wall Street crash
of 1929,” Hill wrote. “Slowly but surely that mass thought was crystallized into its
physical equivalent, which was known as a ‘depression.’ This had to happen, it is
in conformity with the laws of Nature.” Some people attributed to Hill one of the
most famous lines in American history, from FDR’s inaugural address in 1933: “The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Dean knew all about that first fear. He
searched himself and recognized the power of his father’s poverty thinking. But here
was an author who could explain how to master it: “You either control your mind or
it controls you.”

Anyone peddling the secrets of success might turn out to be a snake oil salesman.
Glenn W. Turner, the cosmetics emperor, claimed to have read Napoleon Hill in 1966
and taken him as an inspiration, but all Turner had done was con Dean’s parents by
perverting Hill’s message into “Dare to Be Great.” Spiritual and material thirsting
were always mingled in Americans, leaving them easy prey to hucksters of the cloth,
the book, the screen. What Hill did was to take the limitless native belief in the
powers of the self and organize it into a system that sounded like a practical philosophy.
He taught Dean to believe that he was the author of his own destiny.

It was around the time Dean found Napoleon Hill that he had the dream about walking
down an old wagon road.

TAMMY THOMAS

The job wasn’t that hard once she got used to it, but starting out on the assembly
line she had to remember where all the freaking wires went and all the parts, and
the line was moving, that thing was rotating at eye level, and if you weren’t paying
attention it would get away from you. They were making wiring harnesses for GM electrical
components, and the assembly table was oblong, fifty feet or so, eight or ten stations
per aisle, the women standing at their stations in safety glasses and gloves. The
wiring harness started out blank, and then the first station would put on connectors
and a couple of wires, and then the next station would have eight or ten wires to
plug in, and it would get built as it went around, and the last person would take
it off the line, grease it if it needed greasing, and pack it. They pulled a harness
off every two or three minutes, which might seem like plenty of time unless you fell
behind.

More experienced workers figured out shortcuts, like draping wires over their shoulders
or hanging a connector with plug-in wires around their neck instead of walking back
to the rack to pull out new wires each time, or plugging their wires into the connector
ahead of time so when the harness came down they could just stick the connector in
instead of doing everything then. As long as you made rate, that left time to read
a book, or talk to the next person, or listen to your music. When she had been at
it for a few months and was good enough to have her own system, Tammy could actually
work two stations. At the Austintown plant they took their lunch break at the bars,
and some of them came back drunk, and there was one guy who paid her twenty dollars
to work his station for an hour while he sobered up. All you needed to succeed on
the line was discipline and a little creativity, and she had those. But at first she
did it exactly the way Methods told her, and sometimes she’d end up trying to finish
in someone else’s station. A few people put down a piece of red tape, telling you,
“I don’t want nobody in my station, don’t cross this tape.”

Her first year, she was laid off before she had her ninety days, which was when health
benefits kicked in—then they brought her line back. For a while after that she was
laid off every year, usually around February or March, five months at the longest,
and during those stretches she made as much as 80 percent of her pay for doing nothing.
The 1984 agreement between Packard and Local 717 of the Electrical Workers started
her out at 55 percent of the base rate for everything, wages and benefits and vacation,
and then she had to work ten years to get up to maximum rate. Once she had seniority
she could bump someone with less time out of a better job, like running the high lift
at the distribution center, or a better shift, like day turn so she could be home
when the kids got out of school. But in her first ten years she got bumped around
a lot by older workers. Most of Packard’s plants were in Warren, but there were others
scattered all over the Valley, and Tammy worked in just about every one of them. In
Warren, the main factory on North River Road was a quarter-mile stretch of numbered
buildings all joined together—Plant 10, the cable-making area, Plant 11, where the
high-speed presses ran—and you could walk straight from one end of the factory to
the other, like a street. They called it Route 66.

The worst was Plant 8. Tammy hated working there. The job was bad—a harness with two
wires, a couple of clips, and a grommet, and you assembled a bazillion of them for
eight hours. Plus, the work rules—you couldn’t clock out and leave the plant, you
had to work straight eight and bring your lunch with you. The Jobs Bank was at Plant
8, where they put the newer hires, the third-tier people who didn’t have the same
benefits. On the other hand, the Hubbard plant was her favorite. You didn’t have to
go through turnstiles if you wanted to eat your lunch outside. Hubbard was like a
close-knit family, until they closed it in 1999 and she had to go to Plant 8 despite
having seniority, since there were no other openings.

At first Tammy was kind of excited about being in a union. Youngstown was a union
town and she understood that power, even if the steelworkers had taken a beating.
One year Local 717 went on strike. She had heard all the stories about the mills and
imagined being Rosie the Riveter, a rebel walking the picket line. But she was on
second shift, and by the time it was her turn to walk the line, they had settled.
Over time, she got pretty jaded about the union. She went to a meeting and spent it
watching a couple of white guys argue. She wasn’t paying a babysitter and driving
half an hour to Warren so she could watch two white guys argue. Some of the union
reps were just about themselves, trying to move up to the international so they could
draw down two pensions. At one plant, Thomas Road, which was like a freaking dungeon,
everything dingy and dirty, there was a foreman who would turn on the machines to
shorten people’s breaks and once locked up the phones so the new hires couldn’t receive
calls, and the union rep just sat in his office and didn’t do anything. As Packard
cut more jobs and sent more work off to the maquiladoras in Juarez, the union got
weaker, and you knew in the end it wasn’t going to save you.

The work didn’t destroy your body like in the steel mills, but it beat you down. Tammy
developed asthma after she worked the solder pot at Thomas Road, dipping copper wires
into melted lead—it felt like her chest and back were trying to touch, and it got
so bad that sometimes she had to be hospitalized. Like a lot of workers, she also
got carpal tunnel syndrome—they called it “Packard hands,” treated with splints and
medication—and years after she had stopped working in the factory the pain still sometimes
woke her up at night.

She found out that she could be a little rebellious. Once, a temp came to work in
her area, a white woman in her thirties, divorced with children. This girl was too
scared to take breaks, she was scared to go to the bathroom or talk to anyone, because
she thought she would lose her job. She was one of those people who would come to
work early, when everyone else clocked in five minutes before their shift. She looked
worn and stressed out. One day, Tammy saw the girl down on her hands and knees scrubbing
up oil on the cement floor. That oil had been there for twenty years—she wasn’t going
to get it off, and anyway you were supposed to suck up spilled oil with a vacuum—but
she thought this was something she had to do. The labor gang was getting paid twenty-two
dollars an hour to keep the plant clean, but there she was on her hands and knees,
and the labor gang person sat on his fat behind with his feet up and watched this
girl trying to clean the floor. Tammy hated to see that—how scared the girl was. “You
don’t need to be down there,” she told the girl. She was pissed off enough to speak
to their foreman. “Bob, you know that ain’t right.” But what could she do? Some of
the guys in the skilled trades made life hard for the temps who were coming in and
doing twice the work for half the money. Later, Tammy said, “I felt like this girl
had a family. She needed a job, period. She needed to make money just like you did
twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago, to take care of your family, and she was willing
to dehumanize herself because she needed that job and she could get fired for any
reason. I don’t think our department had ever been that clean before she came.”