Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here
A review of the book Rust Belt Reporter, by former Detroit Free Press columnist John Gallagher.
Source: Pete Saunders
During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore. Each season featured institutions – the sad ubiquity of the illegal drug trade; Baltimore’s port system, and the union desperately trying to remain relevant; government bureaucracy and corruption; troubled public school systems; and the declining influence and resources of the newspaper print industry – trying to make the city better, or simply make a way to survive.
Baltimore is not a city I include in my focus group of Rust Belt cities, but it’s undeniably Rust Belt in its experience. And The Wire spoke to what happens in cities where the foundational economy disappears and nothing enters to replace it, far better than any show I’ve seen.
A lot of people who care about cities saw the series full of metaphors, an opportunity to dig deep into the problems of the inner city without getting too close to them. It was an intellectual journey, or worse yet, lurid entertainment. The Wire’s viewers generally weren’t exposed to the issues of the show’s characters, unless they lived in similar conditions in a similar city. Viewers could watch drug deals and drug hits from the security of their living room, or ponder the moral complexities of political corruption without paying a direct cost. For many, watching The Wire was like watching a trainwreck slowly unfold from a safe distance, or riding a wild rollercoaster ride with the certainty that they would never be thrown out.
Many television shows aim to reach the kind of blunt authenticity displayed in the The Wire, but never reach it. Much of The Wire’s authenticity is attributed to David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer and showrunner of The Wire, with Burns being Simon’s his long-time collaborator in writing and production. Burns, a Vietnam War vet, got a first-hand look at Baltimore’s streets as a detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Upon retirement he later taught 7th and 8th grade students in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Simon gained this authenticity from his years working the city desk for the Baltimore Sun.
Rust Belt Reporter, the wonderful memoir by former Detroit Free Press journalist John Gallagher, reminds us that we need more writers who can accurately depict this aspect of the American urban experience.
As the book’s title suggests, Gallagher’s journalism career is almost entirely centered on Rust Belt cities. He starts as a young reporter with the City News Bureau in Chicago in the 1970’s, before moving on to newspaper gigs in Rochester, NY, and later in nearby Syracuse. However, the bulk of Gallagher’s career was spent in Detroit, where he worked for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years before retiring in 2019. This was the job that gave him as he said “the catbird seat over America’s greatest urban story – the rise, fall, and rise again of a great American city,” and led to most poignant and meaningful writing of his career.
It’s odd how much of Gallagher’s career touches on themes brought to the screen in The Wire. He’d covered drug-related murders; he’d written on United Auto Workers and Teamsters union negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and even on his own union experience as part of a devastating newspaper strike; he’d published investigative stories exploring local government corruption. If anyone were to write the Motor City version of The Wire, Gallagher would have the cred to do it.
Gallagher sort of stumbles into a career in journalism a few years after graduating from Chicago’s DePaul University. He was able to get hired as a reporter for Chicago’s vaunted City News Bureau in 1974, a cooperative news agency founded in 1890 that gathered breaking news stories for the city’s daily newspapers for more than a hundred years.
City News Bureau allowed the Chicago dailies to be everywhere, all the time. The agency became known as a national proving ground for newspaper reporters and columnists, and its list of alumni is impressive: Kurt Vonnegut, Seymour Hersh, Mike Royko and David Brooks are among the hundreds of writers who honed their craft there. Gallagher’s tenure there probably corresponded with the agency’s peak before heading into a steady decline in the 1980s. City News Bureau closed in 2005.
Gallagher took what he learned in Chicago to Rochester, NY with the city’s Democrat & Chronicle newspaper. He followed that with a move an hour east of Rochester to Syracuse, to work for that city’s Post-Standard newspaper. He was successful in both locations; excellent reporting and the resulting accolades led to Gallagher earning a reporting fellowship at Columbia University. He notes that what he learned there would be instrumental to what he would do later in his career. Gallagher left Syracuse in 1987 to work for the Detroit Free Press, with whom he would work for the next 32 years.
Gallagher’s Free Press experience could be divided into two career chapters: the first decade or so being a business and economics writer covering business news throughout metro Detroit, and the last couple of decades as an urban affairs columnist covering Detroit’s downward spiral into political corruption and later bankruptcy, as well as Detroit’s rebound since exiting bankruptcy. That second decade of work was how I got to know of him. What I didn’t know was that the period dividing the chapters was the devastating Detroit Newspaper Strike of 1995, a seminal labor conflict in a city that knows labor conflicts better than any other. Gallagher quoted Chris Rhomberg, an author and Fordham University professor who wrote The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor, as saying, “one side comes to the table looking to make a deal. The other side comes looking to get rid of the table.”
Officially, the strike ended in February 1997, when the six unions leading the strike relented, allowing its members to return to work. Management of the Free Press and Detroit News agreed to accept them, on an as-needed basis based on seniority. Some workers did not return for another three years, in 2000.
Gallagher was able to return to the job later in 1997. His return found him focusing on two transitions in his personal and professional life – the decline of Detroit, and the fading institution of the newspaper industry.
The Free Press is credited with breaking the news on the Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick corruption scandal in the early 2000s. The paper won a Pulitzer in the process, but Gallagher had a very limited contribution to the investigation. His time would come later, as it became clearer that Detroit’s finances were irrevocably broken, and that the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history might be the city’s only saving grace.
Gallagher teamed with fellow Free Press reporter Nathan Bomey (now a business reporter with Axios) chronicling Detroit’s fiscal distress and its move toward bankruptcy protection. That culminated in a long-form investigative series called “How Detroit Went Broke” in 2013, shortly a few months after the city’s bankruptcy filing. Gallagher said that Detroit’s fiscal challenges were some fifty years in the making – not only because of a collapsing tax base with the loss of businesses and residents, but also because deferred agreements and payments into public pension funds, and the fevered borrowing in the 2010s as the bills became due. Gallagher laments the fact that he and Bomey did not win a Pulitzer for the series, and he’s comfortable with that. I’m hardly one to judge what’s Pulitzer-quality material, but “How Detroit Went Broke” certainly feels that way to me.
Gallagher was among the first people outside of bankruptcy negotiations to hear of the creative strategy that would get the city out of bankruptcy – the "Grand Bargain". This quote from the Encyclopedia of Detroit explains the Grand Bargain’s intent:
“Its goals were to prohibit the sale of artwork from the city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) to pay off the city’s massive debt, to preserve city pensions, and to satisfy creditors. Under the terms of the bargain, $816 million was donated by multiple foundations (consolidated into the Foundation for Detroit’s Future), Detroit Institute of Arts donors, and the State of Michigan. The funds were to be dispersed over twenty years to the General Retirement System and the Police and Fire Retirement System to help ameliorate retiree pension cuts necessitated by the bankruptcy. With the bargain in place, Detroit city retirees voted to accept the pension cuts and the DIA was allowed to become an independent institution, owned by a charitable trust, forever protecting its masterpieces from being considered city-owned assets.
Chief federal mediator and U.S. District Chief Judge Gerald Rosen created the original structure of the bargain and arbitrated throughout the sometimes contentious negotiations. State-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr, DIA Director Graham Beal, and heads of many philanthropic foundations were key players in keeping the world-renowned masterpieces in the DIA safe for future generations to enjoy.”
The Grand Bargain was a masterstroke that saved Detroit from fiscal ruin. It’s also a strategy that few other cities could employ.
While Detroit was facing its bankruptcy, the city was also experiencing its revitalization. Gallagher noted that Detroit’s robust nonprofit community, fed by the profits of its 20th century economic heyday, got more involved in city affairs. Nonprofits like the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Kresge Foundation (Kresge’s was the name of the local department store that would later become K-Mart nationwide), all of which had strong Detroit roots, took on roles that the city government was unable to do. They provided leadership for nonprofit projects like the RiverWalk by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and the remaking of Campus Martius Park in the heart of Downtown. Efforts like these, as well as the substantial private investment of wealthy Detroiters like Dan Gilbert, founder of Rocket Mortgage, and the Ilitch family, the founders of Little Caesar’s Pizza, have restored confidence in Detroit and allowed it to blossom again.
I’ve written many times in this space about how Detroit’s fall from grace is unique. As much as we might say it’s so, Detroit’s decline wasn’t solely about the decline of the auto industry. Detroit’s downward spiral was the result of white flight that led to an incredible disassociation with the city itself. Detroit was left to its own devices, with few resources, for two or three generations.
That’s why I bring up The Wire. Viewers wanted to watch it to get a glimpse of what life was like in a post-industrial city without feeling it. In a way it’s not unlike watching a Mad Max film or The Walking Dead, imagining what happens after the apocalypse. I was also a big Walking Dead fan for a time, but I grew tired of it when its bleakness seemed to offer no way out for the apocalypse’s survivors.
If you have any empathy for the people living in dire circumstances, you want to improve their situation, somehow. The empathy bridge requires writers like John Gallagher. Cities like Detroit need people like him, who can document its descent to the bottom – and its rise from the ashes.