Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism » (First Edition)

Now a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Richard C. Longworth was an award-winning foreign correspondent and senior writer at the Chicago Tribune. His previous book, Global Squeeze, was lauded by Foreign Affairs as “an engrossing study of how advanced societies grapple with the disruptive forces of global markets.” Twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Longworth lives in Chicago.

“A superb analysis of the crisis in the Midwest and sober advice on how to alleviate, if not eliminate, the region’s pain…Caught in the Middle provides a brilliant battle plan.”—Chicago Tribune

The Midwest has always been the heart of America—both its economic bellwether and the repository of its national identity. Now, in a newly globalized age, the Midwest is challenged as never before. In Caught in the Middle, longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Richard Longworth explores the new reality of life in today’s heartland and reveals what these changes mean for the region—and the country.

Publishers Weekly

Ex-Chicago Tribunecorrespondent Longworth (Global Squeeze) paints a bleak, evocative portrait of the Midwest's losing struggle with foreign competition and capitalist gigantism. It's a landscape of shuttered factories, desperate laid-off workers, family farms gobbled up by agribusiness, once great cities like Detroit and Cleveland now in ruins, small towns devolved into depopulated "rural slums" haunted by pensioners and meth-heads. But the harshest element of the book is Longworth's own pitiless ideology of globalism. In his telling, Midwesterners are sluggish, unskilled, risk-averse mediocrities, clinging to obsolete industrial-age dreams of job security, allergic to "change," indifferent to education and "totally unfit for the global age." They are doomed because global competition is unstoppable, says Longworth, who dismisses the idea of trade barriers as simplistic nonsense purveyed by conspiracy theorists. The silver linings Longworth floats-biotechnology, proposals for regional cooperation-are meager and iffy. The Midwest's real hope, he insists, lies in a massive influx of mostly low-wage immigrant workers and in enclaves of "the rich and brainy," like Chicago and Ann Arbor, where the "creative class" sells nebulous "information solutions" to "dropouts and Ph.D.s." It's not the Middle West that's under siege in Longworth's telling; it's the now apparently quaint notion of a middle class. (Jan.)

Prologue 1

1 Caught in the Middle 5

2 The Midwest and the Globe 16

3 From Rust to Bust 26

4 Unplugged 43

5 Mega-Farmers 62

6 From Hometown to Slum 82

7 The New Midwesterners 101

8 New Blood for Cities 123

9 Global Chicago and Other Cities 144

10 Left Behind 168

11 Flunking Out 176

12 Betting the Farm 198

13 The Blue and the Red 221

14 Global Midwest 245

Epilogue 265

Postscript 269

Acknowledgments 276

Notes 279

Bibliography 299

Index 303