The Big Factory

A reflection on the power, promise and peril of a local economy centered on one mighty manufacturing plant.

(On 28 June, 2018, Donald Trump (center) came to Wisconsin to break ground, with a gold shovel and Rep. Paul Ryan (right), on a $10 billion FoxConn LCD factory that promised jobs to 13,000 workers.)

The Big Factory

by David Benjamin

“American manufacturers have cut more than 80,000 jobs in the past year.” — Ben Casselman and Ana Swanson, “In 2025, Trade Deficit in Goods Reached Record High,” New York Times, 19 Feb.

MADISON, Wis.—Whenever I head east toward Chicago on I-90, I pass a familiar, almost nostalgic landmark, the now mothballed Chrysler plant in Belvidere. It occurs to me, invariably, how much this sprawling complex has touched my life, although I’d never had—or even considered—a job there.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I spent a summer stamping parts for brakes and clutches in one of Chrysler’s satellite plants in Byron, Illinois. That Belvidere/Byron bond evokes the economic structure that guided people’s lives over a vast region for generations. There’s hardly a normal soul within fifty—no, more like a hundred— miles of the Belvidere plant who went untouched by its presence.

Belvidere—and its bigger sister city a few miles yonder, Rockford—is one of the westernmost communities strung between Interstates 90 and 70 that compose what we call the Rust Belt. Every town along the way has a similar economic heritage, centered on a dominant industry born in the Industrial Revolution: iron, steel, machine tools, railroads, trucks, automobiles, engines, auto parts, tires, refineries, industrial machinery and breweries. Every Rust Belt industry has needed an abundance of strong, silent men and women smart enough to balance a ton and a half of loose bar joists chained beneath an overhead crane, but humble enough to survive five decades on the job resigned to never having really clean fingernails.

I come from those people.

I grew up farther west, in a town where hardly anyone had gone to college and where the town’s working class livelihoods depended on a plastics factory, a dairy, a creamery, a bottling plant, a VA hospital, the Milwaukee Road frog shops, a vast Army camp just down the road on Highway 16, and a lot of joints where you could drink beer. Tomah, in those salad days, was an oasis of blue collar prosperity.

But we didn’t have a Big Factory. I didn’t fully appreciate the immense power of the Big Factory in a Rust Belt town until I lived, during college and afterwards, in Rockford and Beloit, Wisconsin. I saw how the presence of the Big Factory was both source and hindrance for community prosperity. I realized how it shaped the dreams of its employees’ children, who were expected—if they worked hard in school—to go on to something better than their proletarian parents.

Until it closed, the Belvidere plant served the working stiffs of Boone County and beyond as the big fallback. If you screwed up in school, or your garage band broke up, or your girlfriend got pregnant, Belvidere was there for you, holding out the chance of a punchcard and a paycheck. Once hired, at UAW wages, you could support a family, especially if your woman had a job, too. You could buy a double-wide, put the kids in parochial school, maybe even get a boat.

But the Belvidere plant had a dark side, its shadow touching every hamlet within its erratic orbit, looming over every school board, every mom-and-pop tool-and-die outfit, every restaurant and watering hole. When things went sour for Chrysler, they went sour for Boone County, for Rockford, for thousands of paycheck-to-paycheck workers in that hundred-mile radius, for everyone vulnerable to every little tremor in the fortunes of the Big Factory.

When the Belvidere plant went on annual hiatus to re-tool for the next year’s models, a swath of America held its breath, wondering if this “temporary” layoff would be two weeks or two months, or maybe this was the year we all knew would come eventually, when Detroit (or Washington, or God) decided Belvidere just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

That year hit in 2023. They’re saying that the plant’s new owners, Stellantis, is going to re-open in 2027 and start assembling Jeeps.

But wait. Not ’til 2028. Or maybe not at all.

When I lived around there, I had neighbors whose lives hung on the day-to-day, year-to-year, life-or-death sustenance and suspense that emanated from that big plant in Belvidere.

Driving down I-90 nowadays, I pass towns with a similar heritage. In Beloit, the Fairbanks Morse empire was once so mighty that its semi-pro football team beat the Green Bay Packers. In Kenosha, American Motors once reigned, until it died. In Racine, J.I. Case and Johnson Wax are still there, fundamental and fearsome, but just north in Milwaukee, Allis-Chalmers is gone—along with the Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz breweries. Rockford, once a pillar of the Rust Belt, had a half-dozen smokestack giants. Now, not so much. And in Janesville …

General Motors closed its Janesville plant in 2009. Amazing, really, because its Congressman, Rep. Paul Ryan, was a Janesville guy. In 2009, Ryan—who eventually rose to the Speakership of the House—voted against the GM bailout, out of right-wing dogma, rooted in his experience as a scion of Janesville’s small upper crust. His vote defied a basic political commandment: that an honorable Congressman’s first job is to keep open, come hell or high water, the Big Factory in his district. Ryan was supposed to fight for his people.

Until he didn’t.

In the now bygone industrial America, a politician understood that the Big Factory was the local economy’s lifeblood. It was the cornerstone of the community’s middle-class, the glue that held local society intact and the mark of aspiration for every kid in every local high school. It sponsored bowling teams and Little League. It paid for school buses and underwrote the Department of Public Works. It was the best hope and the last resort.

America’s political class, typified by Ryan, had little motive to preserve that hope and foster that resort. Their campaigns were funded by donors whose wealth depended how fast they could close the Big Factory and how far away they could offshore the factory’s work. Donald Trump has won two elections by promising to build factories while building nothing but his personal slush fund. Joe Biden actually restored a modicum of domestic production by pushing the CHIPS Act through Congress and nursing a massive climate change bill disguised as the Inflation Reduction Act. But neither Trump’s lip service nor Biden’s good intentions have offered much solace to Boone County or Janesville.

The biggest “development” of Donald Trump’s first reich was a vast FoxConn LCD factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. With $10 billion in promised investments, projected to employ 13,000 people, with Trump wielding a gold shovel at the groundbreaking, this was the Second Coming of the Big Factory.

Until it didn’t come.

Nine years after Trump’s shovel turned over nothing but dirt, FoxConn unloaded its four square miles in Kenosha County to Microsoft, which plans to build an immense artificial intelligence (AI) data center that will employ—once it’s built—a bunch of robots, hardly any people and no union members at all.

In the era of the Big Factory, everyone in Belvidere knew what work was done there. They knew what was made in that huge building and they knew how much it paid. They knew its shifts, its noise, its smell. They knew what it meant to them, the security it promised and the fear that that it might someday go away.

Now, hardly anyone in Kenosha—or Belvidere, or any of their Rust Belt neighbors—has any idea what AI is or does. They can’t see it, hear it or smell it. What little they know is that a data center—no matter much space it occupies, how much power it drains, how much water it sucks out of Lake Michigan—ain’t no Big Factory. They know there are no jobs there and they fear, intuitively, that it might take away the only job they’ve got left.

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PERSONAL STUFF

A reminder:

For any possible fans of Benjamin’s work, he’ll be appearing on Saturday, 21 February, at 11 am at the spiffy new Prairie Pages bookstore, 113 West Main Street, in Sun Prairie. He’ll focus discussion on An Apartment in Paris. If you’ve been to Paris or want to go, this is an opportunity to see the City of Light beneath the surface.

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(Learn about David Benjamin and about his Last Kid Books titles—including An Apartment in Paris, all five of his Jim Otis novels—Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat—and an archive of Weekly Screeds at www.lastkidbooks.com)