The smokestacks of abandoned factories will mark the skyline like tombstones of a dying middle class
Perhaps it was just an open date on his calendar that led President Barack Obama to pump for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal, on the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. The president didn't mention the coincidence in his speech Friday at Nike's corporate headquarters in Oregon. But it inspired me to pay a sentimental visit to Western Electric Co.'s old clock tower in Cicero.
It offers visual witness to America as it was when Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, and to where our country is presently headed. The clock tower stands in the middle of the Hawthorne Works shopping center, flanked by a big-box store and fast-food restaurants — the kind that offer minimum-wage jobs. But during World War II, it was part of a sprawling industrial plant devoted to the war effort. It built the radar sets that enabled GIs to spot the enemy. Afterward it reverted to producing telephone equipment, paying decent wages that enabled workers to buy the tidy bungalows for which Cicero is famed.
It is long gone, as are other Chicago-area factories that provided the arms that defeated Germany and Japan — and built the American middle class. Bemoaning their loss, Obama argues, won't solve our economic problems. In his speech at Nike, the president took note of critics who claim that trade deals have given an edge to foreign manufacturers, costing American jobs.
According to Obama, opposition to or support for pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes down to "a question of the past versus the future." Granting the president's point that the dubious are living in the past, consider what that past was like.
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