The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (7 page)

Tammy was too young to know it, but the Purnells were one of the wealthiest and most
prominent families in Youngstown. Anne Tod Purnell was a direct descendant of David
Tod, founder of the first coal mine on Brier Hill, which in 1844 initiated iron manufacturing
in the Mahoning Valley just in time for the Civil War, when Tod was elected governor
of Ohio. Her husband, Frank Purnell, was chairman of the board of Dollar Savings Bank
and, from 1930 to 1950, president of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, the fifth-largest
steelmaker in the country and the largest employer in the Valley. The Purnells lived
in the upper-class district around Crandall Park on the north side, in a brick mansion
at 280 Tod Lane, with seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, several fireplaces, a library,
a ballroom, a conservatory, and a carriage house. They belonged to Youngstown’s industrial
Protestant elite in the middle of the twentieth century, when the city was at its
zenith, an elite that had controlled Youngstown since the Civil War—controlled it
to an extent that was unusual even for a small, landlocked, parochial steel town—and
that was already fading by the time a black girl with roots in North Carolina was
born on the east side in 1966. And yet Tammy had a living memory of it, in the Purnell
mansion.

*   *   *

From the 1920s until 1977, twenty-five uninterrupted miles of steel mills ran northwest
to southeast along the Mahoning River: from the Republic Steel plants around Warren
and Niles, through the U.S. Steel plant in McDonald and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube
blast furnaces on Brier Hill, to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works right in the middle of Youngstown,
and on down to the sprawling Sheet and Tube plants in Campbell and Struthers. The
blast furnaces ran twenty-four hours a day, and the wall of heat, the clang of metal
and hiss of steam, the pervasive smell of sulfur dioxide, the smudged charcoal sky
by day and hellish red glare by night, the soot-covered houses, the dead river, the
packed taverns, the prayers to Saint Joseph the Provider, patron saint of workers,
the rumble of train cars carrying iron ore and limestone and coal over dense networks
of tracks through the city—all of it said that Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel,
that everyone here owed life to the molten pour of iron shaped to human ends, that
without it there was no life.

The city’s industrial families—the Tods, Butlers, Stambaughs, Campbells, Wicks—made
sure things stayed that way. They were the only elite that Youngstown produced, and
they prevented other industries from taking hold and competing for its large immigrant
workforce. Youngstown had two symphony orchestras, one made up entirely of steelworkers
and their families. The city was prosperous and inward, isolated in a valley halfway
between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. And, neighborhood by neighborhood, it was cut off
from itself—Italians from Slovaks and Hungarians, native-born workers from foreigners,
laborers from managers, blacks from everyone else.

Youngstown Sheet and Tube was the city’s largest steelmaker to remain independent
and locally owned, with four blast furnaces at the Campbell Works and two at the Brier
Hill Works just north of downtown. Sheet and Tube embodied the ferocity of industrial
work in Youngstown—rapacious growth, brutal conditions, segregation of mill jobs by
ethnicity and race, unalterable hostility to unions, constant strife. Frank Purnell
started working at Sheet and Tube as a fifteen-year-old hall boy in the city office
in 1902, two years after the company was founded. In 1911 he married Anne Tod, considerably
improving his social position in Youngstown, and in the early twenties they built
a grand house on Tod Lane. He rose through the ranks of Sheet and Tube to become president
in 1930. In official portraits he wore the starched collar of his time, with a watch
chain hanging from his suit vest—a hatchet-nosed man with a double chin, a tousle
of silver hair, and the faint smile of imperturbable confidence that belonged to a
secure capitalist class.

In the thirties, the old order began to give way. In 1936, John L. Lewis, the volcanic
head of the mine workers’ union and of the Committee for Industrial Organization,
announced the formation of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in a Pittsburgh
skyscraper where the steel barons also had their offices; he placed his deputy, a
mild Scotsman named Philip Murray, at its head. Lewis and Murray’s aim was to achieve
what no one had ever succeeded in doing: finally bring the workers of this giant industry
under a union. Soon, organizers were driving into steel cities like Youngstown and
talking with workers in ethnic clubs, churches, and meeting halls. But the thinking
of the new industrial organizers was the opposite of parochial: they preached class
consciousness above ethnicity, religion, race, and sex—not in the name of overthrowing
capitalism, but in order to bring workers into the middle class, making them full-fledged
members of an egalitarian democracy. Lewis’s tactics were radical, but his goals were
entirely within the American system.

In the spring of 1937, twenty-five thousand workers in the Mahoning Valley joined
a national steel strike. Banned from the airwaves, they mounted loudspeakers on trucks
and went neighborhood to neighborhood to announce the next meeting or picket. They
also stockpiled baseball bats. Almost none of the strikers were black. In the past,
black workers had been brought up from the South as strikebreakers, and for decades
they were consigned to the dirtiest, most menial jobs in the mills, like scarfer—taking
the defects out of the steel with a blowtorch. They shared a deep mutual wariness
with their white coworkers, one that even the idealistic rhetoric of SWOC couldn’t
overcome.

It became known as the Little Steel strike. The organizers didn’t target the behemoth
U.S. Steel, which had already yielded to labor’s economic power and recognized the
union in March, having just the month before been given the object lesson of a successful
sit-down strike by auto workers at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. Instead,
SWOC went after a group of smaller companies, including Republic Steel, headquartered
in Chicago, and Sheet and Tube. Unlike U.S. Steel, which was a national company with
a larger sense of its role in a modern industrial society, the Little Steel companies
were narrow in outlook and regarded unions with undiluted hatred. They kept the mills
open by forming groups of “loyal employees,” and they set up heavily armed private
forces that were resupplied by air on landing strips built inside the gates.

Violence was inevitable. It came first in South Chicago, on Memorial Day, when police
opened fire into the backs of a crowd of union sympathizers, killing ten men and wounding
women and children. The following month it was Youngstown’s turn, and on June 19,
two strikers were killed outside the gate of a Republic Steel plant. Frances Perkins,
President Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, called for arbitration, but instead the
owners asked for the mills to be protected by state troops. The governor of Ohio sent
in the National Guard, the strike was broken, and the workers returned to their jobs.
Altogether, seventeen people were killed in the Little Steel strike of 1937. The public
began to turn against labor’s new militancy, and in the short run the companies won.

But the defeat of 1937 led to victory in 1942, when the National Labor Relations Board
ruled that Republic and Sheet and Tube had used illegal tactics to crush the strike.
The companies were forced to recognize SWOC and enter collective bargaining. Youngstown
became a solidly union city, just as World War II was beginning, bringing with it
the economic security that workers had always craved—even, as the years went by, for
black workers. The mill was hot, filthy, body- and soul-crushing, but its wages and
pensions came to represent the golden age of American economic life.

Frank Purnell continued to run Youngstown Sheet and Tube after the war, speaking the
new institutional language of labor-management relations, while the old class conflicts
remained alive. In 1950, he stepped down as president and became chairman of the board,
and in 1953 he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His widow, Anne, lived on for almost
two more decades in the mansion at 280 Tod Lane—years when most of the other elite
families sold their mills and left Youngstown for more cosmopolitan, better-smelling
locales. The steel companies continued to keep out other industries that might have
competed for Youngstown’s labor force. In the fifties, when Henry Ford II was exploring
the possibility of opening an auto plant on a railroad scrap yard north of the city,
local industrialists and absentee-owned corporations threw up enough obstacles to
kill the idea. In 1950, Edward DeBartolo built one of the country’s first strip malls
out in Boardman, and the growth of shopping plazas began to sap the commercial heart
of town. White workers moved to the suburbs for work in lighter industry, opening
up good jobs in the steel mills for the first time to the black workers who stayed
behind. As transportation costs rose, the geography of American steelmaking moved
to deepwater ports like Cleveland, Gary, Baltimore, and Chicago, and Youngstown’s
steel industry stagnated while foreign competition began to catch up.

Finally, in 1969, Youngstown Sheet and Tube—by then the country’s eighth-largest steelmaker,
and the last one in the city to remain locally owned—was sold to Lykes Corporation,
a New Orleans–based shipbuilding conglomerate, which planned to pull money out of
its new acquisition, using the company’s cash flow to pay down debt and expand other
operations, eventually cutting its dividend and dropping “Youngstown” from its name.
So by the early 1970s, though no one knew it yet, the city was already in a state
of decline.

The Purnells had no children, and the widow lived alone, except for her sister, Lena,
and also an aging colored maid named Virginia. After the sister died, and Mrs. Purnell
fell and broke her hip on her way to tend the furnace in the carriage house, the maid
began staying overnight Mondays through Fridays and became Mrs. Purnell’s companion.
Anne Tod Purnell died in 1971. During the months when the disposition of the estate
remained uncertain, the maid was brought to live in the mansion as a caretaker, along
with her granddaughter and five-year-old great-granddaughter.

*   *   *

Tammy couldn’t remember how long they lived in the Purnell mansion, but at the time
it felt like forever. When they moved there, the tulips and rose garden were in bloom,
and Tammy started kindergarten there, and they celebrated Christmas there. When they
arrived, some of the furniture was being taken out of the house, and all the beautiful
rugs were gone from the great foyer. Soon after that, the living room furniture disappeared,
and at Christmas the dining room table was gone, and then someone tore out the chandelier
that had hung in the dining room, leaving exposed wires, which outraged Granny. Piece
by piece the estate was dismantled before the sale of the house. Mrs. Purnell’s driver
was given her car, and the gardener and household staff, Granny included, received
five thousand dollars each. Tammy’s mother kept Mrs. Purnell’s silver-framed mirror
and silver hairbrush. At Christmas Tammy got a bicycle, and she learned to ride it
in the empty living room.

The house was bigger and fancier than anything she could imagine. There were so many
places to hide, and flowers she’d never seen before in the garden, and a front-loading
washing machine in one of the seven rooms in the basement, nickel-plated counters
in the kitchen, and a buzzer on the dining room floor to call servants. Tammy, who
wasn’t supposed to play in that part of the house, once stepped on it and scared herself
when the thing went off. Her favorite room was Miss Lena’s old bedroom on the second
floor, with a back porch. It was painted green, like the rest of the house, except
for Miss Lena’s long bathroom, which had gold-colored tiles and a stand-up shower
that was amber. They shared the bathroom with Tammy’s mother when she was there, but
Vickie didn’t like being in the big empty house—she believed that it was haunted.
Tammy found a hoop slip in an old trunk, with wire rings and ruffles, and she would
put it on and twirl around the third-floor ballroom the way she imagined people dancing
in an earlier time. She descended the grand stairway like a princess, and she performed
shows on the circular patio for an audience of bushes. Granny kept her close to the
house, forbidding her to leave the yard or climb the big tree, which she did anyway.
On weekends they walked down to Crandall Park and fed the swans.

The adventure ended in early 1972, around Tammy’s sixth birthday, when a family bought
the mansion. Granny was allowed to take some surviving furniture and dishes, including
Mrs. Purnell’s handmade bed and dressing table, white with gold trim. She and Tammy
returned to the east side, and with her bequest Granny made a down payment on a wood-frame
house at 1319 Charlotte Avenue, which she bought for ten thousand dollars. And it
was there that Tammy lived, almost continuously, until she was twenty-six.

She attended a series of schools named after presidents—Lincoln, Madison, Grant, Wilson;
not one of them would escape the wrecking ball. In class pictures she was the thin,
light-skinned girl in pigtails, with soft, expectant eyes, as if something good was
about to happen. She loved going to the old amusement park at Idora and riding the
Wildcat roller coaster, but her favorite place in the city was Mill Creek Park, eight
hundred acres of woods and ponds and gardens on the border of the south and west sides.
From the northern end of the park you could see the steel mills and train tracks,
but you could also scramble over rocks, lose yourself on the trails, and talk to yourself
and God. Granny sometimes took her there, or she would go with the Pearl Street Mission,
where she was sent after school. At the mission, which was near her house on the east
side, the kids would scoop out the insides of oranges, fill them with peanut butter,
poke a hole in the rind, thread a piece of yarn through it, then hang the oranges
from trees in Mill Creek Park for the birds—though Tammy never saw a bird eating peanut
butter out of an orange. If she could live anywhere in the city, it would have been
near the park.