The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Ray Carver was a drinker, like his father, who worked as a saw filer at a lumber mill in the Yakima Valley in Washington. As a boy growing up in the 1940s and 50s, Ray loved to hunt and fish, but he also liked to read. He started a writing correspondence course from a school in Hollywood but ran out of money to finish it. His parents expected him to work at the sawmill, but he didn’t. He got a girl named Maryann pregnant and married her. He was 20, she was 18, and their daughter was born in 1957. They lived in various places throughout the West doing menial work. Ray wrote and rewrote short stories over several years about people who did not succeed or achieve their dreams. They were written in language that sounded ordinary yet strange.

In the early 70s, Maryann got a degree and took a job teaching high school English. It offered the Carvers more stability, but then things fell apart. Both Carvers had affairs. They went bankrupt twice. He almost went to prison for tax evasion and ended up in and out of rehab for alcoholism. When he drank, he could become a different person, and one night he attacked Maryann with a wine bottle, causing her to lose sixty percent of her blood. A few months later, in 1976, his first story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published with a dedication to Maryann. Ray left to live alone on the northern coast of California. He gave up drinking because he feared he would no longer be able to write, and in 1978, he and Maryann split up. Though he would die just ten years later from smoking, his stories became wildly popular. He won prizes and acclaim and found happiness with a poet. His writing left the trappings of minimalism behind and became fuller, offering a more generous vision of life. He became middle class.

He became known as a chronicler of the despair of lower-class Americans. Though many readers were scared of knowing actual blue-collar realities, they could read his stories and feel as though they understood that spirt and even fetishize it. Yuppies loved his stories because they confirmed that they were superior and deserved to have more. 

Dean spent seven years selling Johnson & Johnson orthopedic knees and hips and living in Pennsylvania. He married a woman who also had worked for Johnson & Johnson and had two sons—Chase in 1993 and Ryan in 1995. But the marriage fell apart shortly thereafter, and Dean began drinking. In 1997, he quit his job before he could get fired and moved back to Rockingham County to escape the unfriendliness and cold winters of the north. Also, he wanted his sons to grow up knowing farming, fishing, and small town life, including the entrepreneurial spirit he believed was innate to farmers. In North Carolina, he joined a Baptist church and was baptized for the third time in the Dan River.

Rockingham County is part of the Piedmont, the plateau of red clay fields and hills between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coast. The economy of the Piedmont for most of the twentieth century was driven by tobacco, textiles, and furniture, but by the time Dean came back, these industries were showing signs of trouble. Most of the tobacco in the area had been sold to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, which oversaw all parts of the cigarette-making process. The company’s eponymous founder had become the richest man in North Carolina after inventing the packaged cigarette in the 1870s. The company had taken care of its (segregated) employees for years, too, offering housing, free day care, and stock options. But sales peaked in 1983 and declined each year after that. The company merged with Nabisco Foods in 1985 and a few years later became the target of the largest leveraged buyout in history. A Wall Street firm acquired it and began cutting workforce to pay off debt. Local tobacco farmers Dean knew had made good money selling tobacco up until a peak price of $2.25 per pound in 1990. After the tobacco lawsuits in the 1990s, many farmers could no longer make money on tobacco but also were too poor to switch their crops. They let their fields grow hay or lie fallow.

Textile mills had come to Piedmont in the late nineteenth century. Mill towns took care of their employees but fought unionizing efforts. When the mills began to collapse, few had anything to fall back on. Some blamed it on NAFTA, corporate greed, labor costs, or the inevitability of decline in the face of technological innovation and globalization. Furniture making had been even older than textiles. But by the early 200s, Chinese competition wiped out most of the industry.

In 1997, the Piedmont’s decline was just beginning. Most people still worked, there were no Wal-Marts, and crack and meth hadn't yet infiltrated Rockingham County, but still, it was unusual for someone to return to the county after having escaped as Dean had done. He viewed his return as a victory over the past and the poverty he had grown up with. Dean’s inherited family land lay on the newly widened Route 220 which had become a trucking route. He decided to build a convenience store, fast food restaurant, and gas station right on the road. His inspiration was a chain he’d seen in Pennsylvania called Sheetz, which put competitors out of business by lowballing them on gas. He bought a Tastee Freez franchise to go with his gas station and styled his convenience store on a country store. In October of 1997, he opened the store, selling gas at 89 cents a gallon. In the summer of 2000, he opened another gas station 45 minutes north in Virginia. All profits at his businesses had to come from the fast food, as the gas was priced too low to make money. Shortly thereafter, he found out Sheetz was opening a station near his new Virginia location, and he realized he needed to drop his gas prices even lower to stay competitive. He did not realize until years later that Exxon Mobil was selling Sheetz gas at a lower price than he could get due to the number of Sheetz chains across the country. Dean was able to survive and open a truck stop and stand-alone Bojangles chain near Martinsville.

In the late 1990s, Dean was searching for something more in life. Dean connected with a commercial builder named Rocky Carter, who fronted him money for his second location. Carter was a spiritual person who gave Dean a book written in 1937 called Think and Grow Rich. The book’s author, Napoleon Hill, had grown up poor in southwestern Virginia and had his life changed in 1908 when he went to Pittsburgh to interview Andrew Carnegie for Success magazine. Carnegie was smitten with Hill and asked him to interview his friends and write a book about the new economic philosophy that allowed men to become successful. Hill spent two decades interviewing other rich men as well as other luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Wilbur Wright, and Clarence Darrow. After a stint advising President Franklin Roosevelt, Hill published his findings in Think and Grow Rich.

Dean absorbed the book, noting that Hill’s famous quote is “If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.” Dean was inspired by Hill’s meta-spirituality and came to believe himself to be the author of his own fate. 

Tammy found the assembly line job pretty easy once she got the hang of it. Most experienced workers found shortcuts, and with time, Tammy did too and was able to work two stations at a time or buy some free time waiting for the harness to move to her stations down the line. Still, the work was not steady. She was laid off for stretches of each year, and she had to move to different factories regularly. Her union went on strike one year, but it didn’t last long. She grew cynical about the union in general, as it didn’t seem to do anything to help the workers and grew weaker each year as Packard moved more jobs to Juarez, Mexico. She developed asthma and carpal tunnel syndrome. Still, she liked her coworkers, who became friends, and the income to bring home to her kids.

At the same time, Youngstown was declining further. Crime and murder were on the rise; drug gangs had moved in and replaced the Mafia that used to control crime. Tammy’s little brothers sold drugs outside the house on Charlotte, and Vickie had begun to use heroin again. Her brothers would do prison time after a serious gang war between the Bloods and Crips. Vickie’s house was next to a scene of violence caused in part by Tammy’s brothers and, in retaliation, her house was shot up and bombed. It was eventually destroyed by the city, a loss that devastated Vickie who knew it to be worth $4000. By then, Tammy had left the east side.

Granny’s house wasn’t spared either. Thieves broke in, and because she was legally blind, Granny had to be moved to the south side, where she died after just three months. Tammy could only get $5000 for the house, though Granny had paid double that in 1972. Tammy’s own house on the south side cost $25,000.

Tammy had a fiancé named Brian. He was killed over an argument with someone whose family Tammy had known for decades. Brian was the closest her children ever had to a father figure, and after his death, she began going to Mill Creek Park three days or more a week to be alone with God and nature. Slowly, the south side was getting to be as bad as the east side with a new gang taking over. She couldn’t sell her house, so she ended up cutting her losses by getting the bank to take the house in exchange for the mortgage being written off. She thought about leaving Youngstown, but she figured things were bad everywhere and she was a few years from earning full pay and benefits. She started a side business helping people plan weddings and another selling Avon products at the factory. All three of her kids made it to college. Tammy knew she did what she had to do with her kids, just as her great grandmother had done for her.

Sam Walton was born in 1918 in Oklahoma. During the Depression, his father repossessed Missouri farms for an insurance company, and Sam remembered that his father would try to leave the farmers who’d lost everything with a little dignity. That’s where he got his own cautious attitude from. He was cheap.

An ambitious young man, he could sell things easily at a young age. After college, he worked at a J.C. Penney store where he learned that employees who were called “associates” had more pride in where they worked. He bought a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas with help from his father in law. There, he got to thinking about how to turn higher profits. He learned he could buy satin panties for fifty cents less per dozen than the Ben Franklin supplier sold them, and he began selling the cheaper panties at four pairs for a dollar as a promotion. He made less per pair but sold more pairs. People, he knew, would never turn down a deal, and his business philosophy came to depend on low prices and high volume.

Sam lost his store in Newport to a landlord, but in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1950, he opened Walton’s 5&10. Over the next decade, he and his brother Bud opened another fifteen stores in towns smaller than those Kmart and Sears would even consider. Sam would spot locations from his two-seater Air Coupe and worked tirelessly to scour the competition and hire the best employees from rivals.

In 1962, Sam opened his first discount-only store in Rogers, Arkansas. Trying to save money on even the letters in the sign, he called the store “Wal-Mart” and promised low prices every day. By 1970, there were 32 Wal-Marts in four states, and. With the company now publicly traded and the Walton family retaining more than two-thirds of the shares of the stock, Sam was worth $15 million. Throughout the 1970s, the chain doubled its sales every two years and continued to expand outward from Arkansas, wiping out local mom-and-pop stores, pharmacies, and hardware stores.

By 1980, there were nearly 300 stores, and the sales exceeded $1 billion. Sam even opened stores in large cities where he found it harder to hire people with high enough moral character. Hillary Clinton joined the company’s board, as politicians (like her husband, the then-governor of Arkansas) began to visit Bentonville to honor Sam who, with a net worth of $2.8 billion, became the richest man in America. He was cheap, not even tipping his barber or donating to charity.

Sam continued to visit stores across the country. He would show up with a plastic name tag on, like a regular clerk, and lead the employees in a chant and a pledge to greet each customer with a smile. In that era, he became Mr. Sam, a folksy cult figure. Even after a leukemia bout in 1982, he assured workers he would still visit the stores as often as he could.

When reporters noted that Wal-Mart employees were paid so poorly that they relied on public assistance, Mr. Sam talked about one exceptional employee who retired with a fortune in stock and claim the store raised everyone’s quality of life by lowering the cost of living. Wal-Mart crushed any efforts of workers at any level to unionize. Wal-Mart employees believed that the company would change if only Mr. Sam knew what was going on. Wal-Mart’s need for low prices also helped drive factories overseas to places where labor costs were cheaper. Mr. Sam responded by starting a “Buy American” campaign, putting “Made in the USA” signs over clothing made in Bangladesh.

In 1989, Mr. Sam got incurable cancer. By 1992, he was fading, and President Bush came to Bentonville to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His money was mostly kept in the family, and eventually six of his heirs would have more money than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. After his death and the disappearance of his folksy facade, Americans knew what Wal-Mart had done to the American economy. The nation as a whole had grown cheap. The heartland’s decay was good for Wal-Mart’s bottom line, as the struggling Americans who lived there became more dependent on cheaper goods. People who lived in places that were growing rich avoided Wal-Mart’s cheap Chinese-made goods and instead purchased everything at expensive boutiques and fancy grocery stores hoping that overpaying might prevent them from being victims of the cheapness overtaking America. Stores that catered to the middle class, such as Macy’s, faded away, too, and the country began to look like the one in which Mr. Sam had grown up during the Depression.