The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

A series of broken sentences (quotations, newspaper headlines, and song lyrics) reveals the world of 1978. It includes lyrics from the Ramone’s punk song “I Wanna Be Sedated,” the death of Elvis, the creation of Graceland as a financially lucrative museum, the story of Jonestown, the closing of factories in Ohio and Pennsylvania, legislation to limit the power of unions and cut property taxes, voters rejecting public service workers, and cries for austerity due to stagflation.

Around 2000, when he was in his late thirties, Dean Price had a dream in which his minister told him his destiny was to plow a road so that others could follow. It took him five years to find his calling.

Dean grew up on a tobacco farm in Rockingham County, North Carolina. He longed for financial freedom. Dean’s father Pete was a smart man but also extremely racist. Most in Pete’s generation were able to find good-paying, permanent jobs in the various mills and factories in the county. Pete took a job with the DuPont plant in the early 1960s but then fell in for a pyramid-style marketing scheme created by Glenn W. Turner selling cosmetics and motivational tapes. The Price family lost their money, and Pete took various other jobs at other factories, always quitting or getting fired by someone he believed was dumber than he was. But his biggest failure came in the work he was most passionate about: preaching.

Throughout Dean’s adolescence, his father moved the family from town to town and church to church. Dean thought of his dad as a hypocrite because, despite his faith, Pete was abusive. His racism did not subside either; he even forced Dean into a religious school so he would no longer have Black teammates on his baseball team. Dean was a smart child who loved to read. He knew he could get a permanent job at the R.J. Reynolds tobacco factory or less prestigious jobs at various mills but chose not to pursue them. Instead, he ended up at a copper tube factory where he made good money but spent all his time partying. He wanted to go to college, but his father would only pay for Bob Jones University, a bible college. Dean found it too rigid and failed out in his first semester. Pete slapped Dean around after that, and Dean vowed to never live at home again. Pete succumbed to an oxycodone addiction, while Dean traveled, continued partying, and finally got a degree at the state university in Greensboro. He admired Ronald Reagan and thought of entering politics but was thwarted by a DUI. Instead, he moved to New Jersey where he worked tirelessly to gain a job at Johnson & Johnson, only to find he hated it. He realized he’d been sold a lie that going to college and getting a job with a big company would lead to happiness. He decided to start on his own path and become an entrepreneur.

Newt Gingrich was born during World War II in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He would later lie that his was an idyllic Americana childhood.

As a boy, Gingrich knew he was destined to lead. His stepfather served in the military, and while visiting him in France in 1958, Gingrich visited Verdun and saw the remnants of the World War I battle. There, he learned that civilizations die and began to fear that America follow this dark path. Back home, he set out to define and defend civilization. Gingrich ended up in Georgia, where he married his high school geometry teacher (with whom he had had an affair as a student) and avoided going to Vietnam. Instead, he studied history at Emory and Tulane where he got a Ph.D. and became a campus activist railing against what he called the “corrupt elite.” Back in Georgia, he took job teaching history at a college near Atlanta and ran for congress in 1974, 1976, and 1978, winning only in his third effort. He was now part of a new group in politics, a man of the so-called New South: middle-class South and oriented around technology and the space program. Gingrich did not run on racial issues or religion but rather on suspicion of bureaucrats and the government itself. With the Moral Majority on the rise, Gingrich talked up family values (while simultaneously cheating on his wife who he would later divorce while she recovered from cancer).

Once elected, Gingrich went to Washington to declare war on the establishment. C-SPAN had just begun airing live sessions of the House of Representatives, and Gingrich gave inflammatory speeches that played to the television audience more than the House itself. Gingrich also recognized that the old party system was failing and that politicians were now independent, entrepreneurial, and reliant on lobbyists, think tanks, and political action committees rather than the old political patronage system. He also noticed that congressional districts were now more partisan and that politics as a whole had become nationalized. He taught other young Republicans the phrases that would win debates in the eyes of voters and how to inflict and win war on the political left. An entire generation of politicians learned how to sound and act like him, and they made him Speaker of the House after the Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in decades.

Once in power, however, his luck ran out. The new president Bill Clinton, a relatively young man from Arkansas, saw through Gingrich’s insecurities and left Gingrich blamed for a government shutdown while winning credit for things Gingrich thought he had accomplished. Attempts to impeach Clinton for extramarital affairs backfired, and Democrats won more seats in Congress in 1998. Because of that, the Republicans who once rallied around Gingrich turned on him. He was forced to pay a massive fine for laundering campaign funds through his various nonprofits. Upon resigning, Gingrich even admitted to having an affair with a congressional aide 23 years his junior. She would become his third wife. Having been in debt for his entire political career, he then launched a career of lobbying and media appearances, using access to power to make him rich. He wrote book after book about America’s decay and the ever-accelerating decline of civilization before running an unsuccessful bid for the White House himself.

Jeff Connaughton first saw Joe Biden speak in 1979 as a 19-year-old business major at the University of Alabama. Biden was 36, the youngest man ever elected to the Senate, and Connaughton was immediately charmed. Connaughton’s dad, a World War II vet and lifelong Republican, worked a good-paying job for a weapons manufacturer, but both he and Connaughton’s mother (a lifelong Democrat) had grown up in poverty. Connaughton himself would waver between the two parties but eventually became professionally employed by Democratic politicians. He believed himself to be the perfect number two to a more powerful person.

As a student, Connaughton was invited to the National Student Congress where he heard Biden speak. Back in Alabama, he started a campus political club and got Biden and a Republican senator from Utah to agree to a debate. When the Republican backed out, Connaughton went to Washington, D.C. with a Mormon friend and tried to convince the senator to reconsider (the Mormon friend was able to get the senator to see them due to shared faith) or to find another Republican who would agree to the debate. Though Connaughton failed, he saw a Washington that was different from the one he would eventually live in. He saw the impoverished mostly Black neighborhoods that make up the majority of the city. He noted a type of bipartisan camaraderie that still existed in the Senate in 1979, though it would soon falter. In Alabama, Connaughton ended up hosting only Biden. Connaughton was blown away and promised to be there for Biden if he ever ran for president.

Connaughton, though impassioned by the idealism of politics, decided to pursue a Wall Street job after graduating. He earned an MBA in Chicago and worked in public finance in New York, where he was upset to see how easy it was to bribe small-town government officials. Later, working in Atlanta, he watched as Biden railed against the white collar criminals the Reagan administration ignored. By the end of 1986, Biden was clearly gearing up to run for president, and Connaughton leveraged a connection with a lobbyist to get a job on the campaign. Biden had become something of a cult figure to him, and Connaughton wanted to switch from Wall Street to the White House.

Another series of broken sentences contains headlines about Apple Computers, the popularity of the TV series “Dallas,” the growth of Florida cities, the AIDS outbreak, and the rise of corporate profits, mortgage-backed securities, and corporate stock trading. Reagan wins in a landslide during a wave of patriotic fervor. Lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s “Downbound Train describe a person losing his job due to a bad economy.

Tammy Thomas grew up on the east side of Youngstown, Ohio in the 1960s and 70s. When she was growing up, that part of town was still mixed, but years later, she’d see how run down it became. She was angry at the abandoned malls and cracked asphalt and, especially, at the decrepit state of her great grandmother’s former house on Charlotte Avenue, abandoned since the mid-2000s and stripped of wiring and woodwork. Tammy was raised by her great-grandmother, who she called Granny. Granny didn’t have a clearly known history, as was common for Black families. What was known was that Granny had moved to Ohio after working in the tobacco fields in Virginia. She found domestic work, and the rest of the family followed. Some of them grew relatively prosperous, with good-paying jobs in the steel mills and houses outside of town. Tammy’s own family was not prosperous, though. Her own grandmother was an alcoholic married to a man who had come back from World War II with a heroin addiction. Tammy’s mother, Vickie, gave birth to her as a teenager and became a drug user shortly after. Everyone lived at Granny’s house, and when Granny would leave for work, everyone except Tammy would use drugs. Tammy would sometimes accompany Granny to her errands and shopping at the nice shopping areas in Youngstown. She would sometimes go to Granny’s employer, a large mansion on Tod Lane owned by one of Youngstown’s wealthiest families, the Purnells, who made their money on steel.

From the 1920s until 1977, steel mills dominated the Mahoning River. Nearly everyone in Youngstown owed their lives to steel, and the families that owned the mills, including the Tods, made sure to keep it that way. The city was prosperous and diverse, although neighborhoods were segregated. Youngstown Sheet and Tube was the largest steelmaker in town and remained independent of the larger steel conglomerates. Like the other companies, it embodied an ethos of greed, segregation, and hostility to unions. The company was run by the Tod family and later by Frank Purnell who had married into the family. In the 1920s, he and Anne Tod built a great mansion on Tod Lane. In the 1930s, a unionizing effort led to the loss of seventeen lives, but the steel mills were later forced to recognize the unions by the federal government. After Purnell died in 1953, his wife continued to live at the mansion on Tod Lane until her death two decades later. In the 1950s, steel companies continued to fight other industries that might move into the valley, such as car companies, and White workers began to move out to the suburbs to work in lighter industries, leaving mostly Black workers in Youngstown. Steel mills slowly moved to larger port cities and began losing out to foreign competition. Though no one knew it, by the 1970s, Youngstown was already in decline.

Tammy does not remember how long she lived at the Purnell mansion. She remembers the massive house being fully furnished and in pristine condition when they moved in but watching it get slowly dismantled before the house was sold. Granny was given $5000 for her services and used it to invest in the house on Charlotte Avenue Tammy would live in off and on for her adolescence. Her mother was in and out of prison, and Tammy remembers accompanying her to the methadone clinic and watching her overdose. Despite her mother’s troubles, Tammy loved her. When Granny stopped working, the family survived on her Social Security checks and Vickie’s welfare checks. Tammy vowed to never be dependent on welfare like so many people she knew.

In September of 1977, the Sheet and Tube’s Campbell Works shut down without warning, leaving 5000 people jobless in an event that came to be known as Black Monday. The union had been focused on contracts and protecting workers, not the overall health of the companies. Union workers had grown accustomed to the security of healthcare and a pension, but the mill was no longer competitive. Other mills closed, then the amusement parks and malls. Youngstown’s east side was hit especially hard, as Black workers had less seniority and, thus, no pensions to dip into yet. The population of the city dropped 50,000 people over the next two decades. This happened in other cities including Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, Syracuse, and others, but it happened first and fastest in Youngstown. Few recognized it as systemic at the time, but the lack of industrial jobs left the area with a new moniker: The Rust Belt.

Tammy was eleven when Black Monday happened and was not fully aware of it, but she noticed changes on the east side. The door from Granny’s house was stolen, and the streets had become less safe. Both her school and neighborhood began to have fewer White people and more Black people. Granny eventually gave her the deed to the house, as Tammy now had to take care of Granny rather than the other way around.

Tammy got pregnant at 15, upsetting Vickie and Granny. Determined to be the first person in her family to graduate high school, Tammy worked hard as a single mother to get her diploma in 1984. She was disappointed to have to sign up for welfare, but she did for her daughter. Tammy got an associate’s degree from a community college and tried to work her way up in a grocery store. She had two more children (a boy in 1985 and a girl in 1987). In 1988, she found a job at an automotive parts plant run by Packard Electric. For $7.30 an hour, she worked on an assembly line making wiring harnesses and electrical parts for General Motors cars. It was lighter industrial work than steel and staffed by many other single mothers like herself. In 1988, Tammy got off of welfare.

Oprah was the richest Black woman in the world but remained an everywoman. Her goal was to lift families out of the projects of cities like Chicago. She wanted everyone to have it all, like she did. And she projected openness and realness while also carefully crafting a finely tuned public image. To millions of viewers, Oprah Winfrey suggested that no one had an excuse for not making it.

As a child, she moved to a Milwaukee rooming house to live with her mother before moving to Nashville to live under the firm Christian household overseen by Vernon Winfrey, a barber she erroneously believed to be her father. There, she found she got along better with White people than Black people. Later she would remark that she only ever felt oppressed by Black people who disliked how dark her skin was or how successful she was. In 1976, she went to Baltimore to work at a local television station instead of continuing studies at Tennessee State. Her producers felt she was too uninformed and lightweight for news, so they moved her to a morning talk show. Though she felt it was a demotion, it was in that position she would become a local star. In late 1983, WLS in Chicago offered her a $200,000 job on its morning show.

She became an emblematic figure of both the 1980s and Chicago, a city that had just elected its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, and was the base for Jesse Jackson, who was just starting his first presidential campaign. Michael Jordan would soon be drafted by the Bulls, completing the ascent of Chicago into the home of the Black elite. To her mirror, Oprah taped a quote she attributed to Jackson: “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” Her ethos was empowerment and entrepreneurship, and she barely cared about politics. She quickly got strong ratings and eventually admitted on air that she had been molested from the ages of nine to fourteen. In breaking the silence on the subject of abuse, she became everywoman battling victimhood and overcoming daily struggles with weight, romance, and past trauma. Moreover, for many of her viewers, she was the only Black person to ever enter their living rooms.

However, as Oprah gained more money and fame, she began to spend more time with celebrity friends and with the trappings of wealth. Her audience remained mostly lower and middle class White women whose struggles and financial troubles would grow each year. She would thrill them by sharing her favorite things or selecting members of the audience who would have their debts paid. They could not live as comfortably as her, of course, but since she was a symbol that anyone could make it, the audience was left with no excuses for their own struggles.

In 1987, Connaughton used the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington to land on the Biden for President. His first assignment was to find twenty people in Georgia who could write a $250 check, a task he did with ease. Because of his success, Connaughton was assigned to work as a fundraiser under Ted Kaufman, Biden’s chief of staff. When candidate Gary Hart was caught in a sex scandal, Biden became a serious contender for the nomination, and Connaughton’s own rise in the ranks paralleled the campaign’s. He was soon traveling with Biden, though the two never spoke except once when he had to brief Biden and his wife Jill before a fundraiser. Connaughton learned that Biden always had time for his family and his inner circle (like Kaufman) as well as any blue collar voter he found anywhere. But other than them, Biden mostly called people “Chief” or “Cap’n” or, when someone messed up, simply “Dumb Fuck.”

Biden did not like fundraising and resented any demands placed on him by donors. As a senator from a small state, he had never needed much money to run for office, and he found the funding demands of a presidential campaign draining.

In September, the media reported that Biden had plagiarized a speech during a debate. Journalists, emboldened by the Hart scandals, dug up other incidents of light plagiarism or embellishment. Connaughton had never thought much of Biden’s speeches and had always been more swayed by his ability to move people, but the speeches mattered to the media. Since 1968, the rules of politics had changed too. A ten-second clip on TV could now make or break a candidate.

Biden could not survive as a candidate. While the Robert Bork Supreme Court confirmations were happening on Biden’s Judiciary Committee, Biden announced he would drop his presidential campaign. Though the Bork hearings would save Biden’s political career, Connaughton was shell shocked, even weeping through Biden’s speech about dropping out of the race. Connaughton was offered a job as a fundraiser for Senate Democrats but instead took a job with Kaufman as a staff on the Judiciary Committee for a salary commiserate with that of a first-year Wall Street associate. It was a step back financially, but, then again, the stock market crash of October 1987 made Wall Street jobs harder to come by, and Connaughton could stay close to his hero.