Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

by Brian Alexander

For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land

WINNER OF THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARDS AND FINALIST FOR THE 87TH CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS | NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 New York Post • Newsweek • The Week • Bustle • Books by the Banks Book Festival • Bookauthority.com

The Wall Street "A devastating portrait...For anyone wondering why swing-state America voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies plenty of answers."

Laura Miller, Slate : " This book hunts bigger game. Reads like an odd?and oddly satisfying?fusion of George Packer’s The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis’ real-life financial thrillers."

The New Yorker : "Does a remarkable job."

Beth Macy, author of Factory " This book should be required reading for people trying to understand Trumpism, inequality, and the sad state of a needlessly wrecked rural America. I wish I had written it."

In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House , journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown 35 years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster’s society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town’s biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Economics, Business, Sociology, Social Issues

336 pages, Hardcover

First published February 14, 2017

About the author

Brian Alexander is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion andAmerica Un­zipped: The Search for Sex and Satisfaction. He lives in San Diego.

Reviews

[Jessica J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "Hocking" in Anchor Hocking is the name of the river that I could see from the window in my childhood bedroom, less than an hour south of Lancaster. This book tells a story that is very important to me, personally.

I have millions of thoughts on this book and I will eventually coalesce them into something coherent, but for now just let me say: fuck Milton Friedman. Fuck him with the biggest, thorniest stick on the planet. Fuck Ronald Reagan for legitimizing Friedman, fuck Mitt Romney for his "corporations are people" bullshit, and fuck Donald Trump for being the prime example of the kind of economics that Brian Alexander is trying to shine a light on here.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up in Lancaster. When I was five I lived on Maud Avenue and could see the west side Anchor Hocking plant from my back yard. My grandma lived by Cherry Street Park and you could see the defunct east side plant from her front porch. But by the time I was in high school Anchor Hocking's heyday had passed. In 1997 Lancaster felt like a dying town, so I did what almost everyone I knew did - I left. But my family stayed and over the next ten years I'd visit once or twice a year when I had leave from the military. And every time I came home the town seemed a little dirtier, a little more run down. Most people didn't blame it on the decline of Anchor Hocking though - they blamed the Community Transition Center (CTC) that Alexander referred to in the book.

But each time I came home I saw more new Dollar Generals and payday lenders, but almost no other businesses opening up. Again, as Alexander observed, nearly the only people in town with decent jobs were the ones who commuted to Columbus. Eventually most of my family left Lancaster too, moving to places like Canal Winchester or other Columbus suburbs to find jobs. The only jobs in Lancaster were low paying service sector jobs.

One friend from elementary school (I'll call him Fred) who stayed is typical of some of the people Alexander profiled. Fred is a staunch Republican. He thinks illegals and "welfare queens" are ruining the country. Fred fathered two children with one wife and gave up his visitation rights a few years after they divorced because he couldn't afford to pay child support. The ex-wife is addicted to pills. Fred went on to father four more children with his current wife. Fred drank heavily and used drugs recreationally, selling some on the side to support his habit. Fred cleaned his life up after he began attending church, but the best job he's had in the last ten years is delivering pizza. He mows yards on the side. He receives Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, help with his energy bills, and sometimes actual cash assistance. Yet he says he hates Democrats because they waste "his" tax dollars on lazy people.

But in spite of its flaws, and for the reasons Alexander outlines in his book, I still love Lancaster. After finishing my time in the military and college out of state I eventually made it back to Ohio (Chillicothe - another town like Lancaster that has been ravaged by opiate abuse and the shuttering of factories). I still make it to Lancaster a couple times a month. Downtown has been revitalized and there are signs of improvement throughout the town. But as Alexander observed, the numerous parks are empty. I don't see many kids riding bikes. The best donut shop in town (Donut World) has a sign telling people to remove masks or hoods before coming in the store. Alexander didn't exaggerate the number of women in pajama pants pushing strollers. People are depressed and fearful.

But what are these people to do? It's fine for a National Review writer in New York to tell people to just get a U-Haul and leave. Real life isn't that easy though. Most people in Lancaster are barely scraping by. Once you count the costs of first month's rent and deposit, it cost thousands of dollars to move. They can't afford to move. People I know would love to move though, or at least they say they would. Where are they going to go though? Lancaster, and thousands of cities like it across the country, has a population of over 40,000. Are they all going to move to the nearest big city?

The solution, as Alexander alludes to, is to move away from Friedmanism and recognize that companies, especially ones that employ such a large portion of a town's population, are about more than just increasing shareholder value. We need to restore the social contract and heal the intense alienation that we feel from our work, our community, our family, and even from ourselves. We've experimented with ruthless, short-term business plans designed to turn a quick profit at the community's expense. The experiment has been a massive failure for those outside of the 1%. It's time to restore the idea that businesses serve their customers, employees, and the community - not only the shareholders or private equity firms who own them.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs."

This is the right book for right now, America 2017, divided, angry, fearful, grossly unequal. This is the book that everyone should have been talking about last year, when instead we were reading Hillbilly Elegy, a far inferior explanation of the "Trump phenomenon", limited by the age and wisdom of its author and its inherent scope as a memoir.

Brian Alexander, native son, chronicles the history of Lancaster, OH and its once-largest employer, Anchor Hocking, maker of glassware. He begins in the 1950's: town and company are both strong, prospering in a symbiotic relationship. Lancaster is a happy place to be: kids growing up and going to state schools, pride in local sports and events, a sense of growth and moving forward. Anchor Hocking's management lives in Lancaster and is invested in the community. Globalization and macroeconomics creep up on Anchor, however, and then it's blindsided by the vulture capitalism of the 1980's, full-tilt Friedmanism, the pursuit of shareholder value above all. The company is tossed between private equity (also known as "leveraged buyout") firms, its assets gutted, its long-term value hollowed out to provide cash flow to its managers, sitting in towers in New York City, who will rid themselves of the company after a few years. This continues up until the late present day, where Anchor's most recent owners (post-bankruptcy creditors) have finally realized their asset's latent value and are tentatively investing in growing its equity.

Through this tale he weaves this narrative with the political and social themes that recur ad nauseam in our fractured society: guns, drugs, racism, "welfare queens" and "Obama phones", health care, joblessness, inequality and the divide between "coastal elites" and "backwards small towns", labor unions, churches, Republicans vs. Democrats, the new service/knowledge economy, and immigration. Hanging over the narrative is the unspoken conclusion, Donald Trump's unlikely ascendancy to power, as the consequence of the last 50 years of economic and social policy.

I have rarely been sadder or more angry reading a book. Reading about the unfettered greed of the last 40 years, the total disregard for communities and human lives practiced by the private equity firms and financiers involved in gutting so many of America's legendary brands (built up over decades) in the pursuit of short-term cash flow was sickening. These financial engineers came in and said that they could find business efficiencies, when in reality they knew nothing about the business or industry. Instead, they ran the companies into the ground, saddled by massive debt.

Furthermore, the Republican Party, which is unabashedly pro-business, blamed these problems on every scapegoat in sight - immigrants, regulation, globalization, etc. And they managed to blind their constituents to the real culprit: big business, and Wall Street financial firms. Democrats are hardly immune from criticism either, but not to the same extent. The massive fraud perpetrated on the American working class in the name of economic growth has instead led to robbing small communities of all their wealth, and concentrating it in the hands of the very few. And we will be paying for it, in the form of social instability, for many decades to come.

Glass House doesn't have the smooth lyricism of "The Unwinding" but perhaps that contributes to its power. The rawness of its words, the barely-contained frustration, will cause me to remember this story for a long time. The writing suffers at points, but it isn't by any means bad. At times the author is wistful, yet avoids easy nostalgia and sentimentality. I couldn't keep all the characters straight - some of their stories were just too similar.

I would have liked to know more about the conditions that made Anchor Hocking weak leading up to the 1980's - the rise of Walmart, the fluctuations in fuel prices overseas, amongst other things - which the author glosses over in a few paragraphs. But on the whole this book is meticulously researched and reported. I'd recommend it to anyone searching for answers, who is not content with the "personal responsibility" narrative, or the "globalization" narrative, or any of the other hollow-sounding reasons why we have a country that's so messed up.

"Why didn't they just move away?" ask elites of all stripes. Woven throughout the book is a strong defense of community, of history, of ties to family, friends, acquaintances, a group of people supporting each other through good and bad times. It's hard to leave that support system behind, regardless of whether or not you can afford to. We need better answers from our economy, from our elected officials, on how to make America work for everyone in the 21st century.

[Carla Bayha · Rating 5 out of 5]

The life and death and signs of life of Anchor Hocking Glass Company serves as a platform to tell the story of how greed brought on by Reaganomics and private equity raiders ("Barbarians") stole most of the capital from a company and a thriving Ohio town, capital that took decades to build, but only a few years to destroy. There's lots of heroin, too, of course. This is a more difficult read than "Hillbilly Elegy," but a far more honest and encompassing book. Put it together with "Dark Money" for a comprehensive look at how we got Trumped.

[Christopher Lawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

GLASS HOUSE a story that shows the more base side of capitalism, where short-term profits are paramount, and people are just things in the way. The story is not a fun read--it's actually quite sad, and unfortunately, there isn't a cheery ending. Nevertheless, this tale is a story that needs telling, and a discussion worth having. The events documented in this book are sure to bring up lots of questions--especially regarding the ethics of corporate buyouts.

Brian Alexander explains what happened to Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation, a historic company in the town of Lancaster, Ohio. (The company is called "Hocking" because of the nearby river.) At one point, the company had 5,000 employees in Lancaster. For decades, Anchor and Lancaster had a good relationship. In times of crisis, the town and the company worked together. For example, in the 1970s, when there was a national shortage of raw material, "Anchor Hocking put out a call. Families loaded their cars with every bottle, jar, and tumbler they could spare."

This mutually beneficial relationship began to change in the 1970s as manufacturing began to dry up. Lancaster saw "steel mills in Youngstown, the NCR (National Cash Register) Corporation in Dayton, and the GM plant in Lordstown lay off thousands."

With Anchor Hocking, it wasn't a question of shipping jobs overseas. In the glass business, production is not so easily shipped off to China. (The logistics of making fragile glass is not at all the same as making electronics.) Nevertheless, businesses like Anchor got a lot more competitive: "Big-box stores like Walmart, with their intense pressure on suppliers to reduce wholesale prices, nibbled away at Anchor’s margins."

GLASS HOUSE relates the story of what happens after repeated leveraged buyouts from sharp businessmen, each looking to extract profit to justify the deal. The buyouts included big names such as Carl Icahn and Cerberus Capital. Most of these "financial engineering" deals were designed to extract as much cash as possible from Anchor--no matter what else the cost. New management was " laser-focused on bottom-line performance."

All the buyouts and reorganizations eventually led to contentious union disputes, with management demanding concessions from the union. Several bitter strikes took their toll, and the union ended up making sizeable concessions.

Each buyout also created turmoil, confusion, and lowered moral. As one example of a morale-killing decision, new management was appalled at the high salaries paid to good sales people. They thought it outrageous that their best sales people made more than they did! So, the new management eliminated commissions, and "approved a decision to turn the sales force into salaried employees—effectively mandating a severe pay cut."

The town of Lancaster was ever optimistic (naive?) that each new buyout would be all for the better: "Lancaster was a place of strong belief. . .if everybody just worked harder," things would somehow work out. "There was an expectation of some renewal, some better outcome,”

All in all, I found GLASS HOUSE a fascinating, if sad read. The pages are filled with stories of hardship and suffering inflicted on the residents of Lancaster. It seems to me the central issue illustrated in this book is, "Do corporate managers have any responsibility to society, or do corporations serve the shareholders' exclusively?"

I found this book easy to read--with just one exception: I found the ownership history of the company so bewildering, I could have used a chart showing me how ownership had changed.


Advance Review Copy courtesy of the publisher.


See also Bassocantor.com

[Lorianne DiSabato · Rating 4 out of 5]

We've all heard the now-familiar story of how the American dream dies. Outsourcing and foreign competition shutter factories, and in the absence of jobs, working- and middle-class laborers turn to heroin and right-wing politics to numb their pain. The story of Lancaster, Ohio initially seems to follow this pattern, with the fates of the town and its citizens following the rise and fall of the local Anchor-Hocking plant. But the fall of Anchor-Hocking can't be blamed on foreign competition, jobs moving to Mexico, or even automation. Instead of falling prey the usual suspects, Anchor-Hocking is a victim of private equity firms (the "1% economy" of Brian Alexander's subtitle) that weigh the worth of companies not by the products they produce but by their place on an investor's balance sheet.

I can't say I fully understand the leveraged buyouts, corporate takeovers, mergers, bankruptcies, and re-acquisitions that bled Anchor-Hocking, its workers, and the city of Lancaster dry. But that's the point. When you're a worker in a factory that is synonymous with your town--a factory where your father worked, and where management and their families once lived alongside their workers in an all-American town--it's difficult to keep track of where your company fits into the vast investment scheme of whatever faceless corporation owns you at the moment. It's difficult to understand the intricacies of the 1% economy, but it's easy to chant "Build the wall." Understanding the plight of Lancaster, Ohio might help us understand the rise of Trumpism, but make no mistake: Anchor-Hocking wasn't destroyed by immigrant labor but by the kind of crony capitalism that now controls the White House.

[Suzie Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this while on vacation in Florida, so maybe that was a n odd choice to read poolside, but this book pissed me off so much. There is sometime so fundamentally wrong with this country and I'm sure there isn't one specific moment in time that we can blame, but Reagan and Friedman and their terrible, greedy, despicable, and disgusting economic policies had a whole lot to do with the state of the country and how unbalanced and unfair it is. I believe that if you work hard you should have success, and the harder you work the more success, and i believe people have the right to have more than they need if they earned it. But there is a limit. And exploiting loop holes and profiting grossly from the misfortune of others is wrong. And these greed mongers who profit off of their own mistakes should not be allowed to continue so recklessly. I don't' have the answers but there needs to be stricter limits in place and business laws need to be fixed so that you can't run a company into the ground and then be rewarded for it, just to turn around and run another in. No one should get to profit off of debt when that is the only thing they do, buy and sell debt, trade in misfortune, make money by having money. It's just disgusting.
As for the writing style, it was a bit boring in parts and rather tedious at times but it's an all too common story.

[Leo Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

GLASS HOUSE by Brian Alexander is the book I thought HILLBILLY ELEGY would be: an insightful. historical dissection of how our politicians have allowed people in flyover America, the once glorious Rust Belt, to suffer and die at the hands of vulture capitalists.

Set on my birth-state Ohio (GO BUCKS!!!!), GLASS HOUSE tells the story of the small, once-prosperous city at the Appalachian foothills name Lancaster, OH. And like many small Midwestern towns, Lancaster's economy was built around a major plant or industry. For Lancaster, that industry was glass.

Award-winning journalist Brian Alexander has a vested interest here: he grew up in Lancaster. he follows the lives of several contemporary Lancastrians to see what makes them tick. The old-timers, who've witnessed the downfall, tell of the hundreds and thousands laid off as a pirate "capitalists" like Carl Icahn purchased and mismanaged Anchor Glass starting in the 1990's. At the time, Anchor was American capitalism at its best. It was well-run, profitable, and its managers and executives dedicated to improving Lancaster. They paid well, and execs hung-out with line-workers at local hang-outs, like the VFW and the Elks.

And then, the "free market tsunami" hit. The plant was snagged in a hostile takeover bid. The new management could not profitably run a glass operation. They were not engineers. They had no manufacturing experience. They had no idea how to maintain machinery and/ or manage inventories, quality or supply chains. Instead, they were financial "engineers" who purchased the company in a leveraged buy-out.

Needless to say, they laid off people. And eventually slid into bankruptcy.

But this is not the story of the life and death of a business. Instead, Alexander is more interested in the larger community. Because as the good jobs dried up, with Anchor passing from one inept private equity firm to the next, Lancaster slid into decline. As is all too common in 21st century America, Lancaster granted Anchor tax-breaks to keep the handful of jobs that remain in town. And yet owner after owner has continued slashing wages, ignoring plant maintenance and cutting the workforce. All of which had a negative impact on Lancaster's tax-base. Which eroded the infrastructure.

But the largest, most detrimental impact of all has been on the tight-knit community Lancaster used to be. Instead of the locals, the recent CEO's and executives chose to live in Columbus. And were more beholden to New York than community building in the Heartland. So they gut Anchor -- and many other companies that Anchor Glass is a stand-in for -- and transfer the hard-work and good-will of these hard-working townspeople towards Wall Street.

Sad.

That said, if you really want to understand why people in "Trump's America" are so disgruntled, you could do much worse than reading this book. It's well-researched and sourced (the majority of Alexander's sources are on-the-record and go by their REAL names... a rarity). And while I've not tracked them all down, since his sources are named, the account rings true.

Five-stars. Really 4.5 bumped up, but a captivating read.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Private equity has made me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Yet private equity can be, as this book shows, a tool of the devil, a corrosive and destructive force in American life. Still, I do not think the story is as simple as Brian Alexander, the author of Glass House, would have it. The town in which he grew up, and which he profiles here—Lancaster, Ohio—has fallen far from its glory days, as have hundreds of similar towns across America. But the responsibility for that lies not just with the shady private equity companies that looted its largest employer, glass manufacturer Anchor Hocking, or with other elements of our rotten ruling class. It also lies with all of us, who bear more than some responsibility for the degradation of our towns, and of ourselves.

Although there are variations, in general “private equity” refers to a certain type of investment firm. Those who manage the firm collect money from investors seeking high returns, and use that money, along with copious additional borrowed money, to buy private companies. They then seek to resell those companies at a higher value within a few years, thereby returning money to investors, and more to themselves, while extracting money along the way. If done competently, those who manage private equity firms can become extremely rich, and they never become poor, since they are not risking their own money. The risks are instead borne by the passive investors, the banks who lend money, and by the companies they buy. Think of those, in most cases, as a goose force-fed to massively increase its liver size. Time is short, and it rarely ends well for the goose.

In my past life, I was a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer; the nature of that business, buying and selling companies, often involves private equity firms. I also studied private equity, and related fields, a great deal in business school, which I attended after being a lawyer. For most of 2020, as I worked toward selling my business, I interacted with a number of private equity companies, who constitute the buyers of most businesses today. This sale process showed, although I already knew them, the differences among private equity firms. As with any firm, each has a personality, and while they are subject to economic incentives, much of their behavior is actually driven by personality. For example, I had signed a letter of intent (an agreement to agree) to sell my company to one private equity company last July. Their personality was a common one for private equity—slick, overconfident, far less smart than they thought, and people I wouldn’t trust to buy me a sandwich, if I were relying on them to bring me the change. Although they were the initial high bidder, it was in their nature, again as is common with private equity companies, to chisel. Failing to read my personality and thinking that I would be desperate to keep a bird in the hand, and so be willing to give up some money for their benefit, they tried to lower the price before the transaction closed. It took me thirty seconds to kill the deal, and I never spoke to them again.

But other firms have different personalities. Soon enough, a bidder that had earlier dropped out, because of the impact of the Wuhan Plague on other companies it owned, came back to the table, offering an even higher price, and quickly closed the deal. This private equity company represented not many investors seeking returns in the traditional way, but family members of one wealthy family (with politics very opposed to mine). This firm’s personality, and all its representatives, were always honest and aboveboard in every way and they were a pleasure to deal with. Moreover, they have successfully continued to run and grow my company, with what appears to be a long-term focus.

Alexander would say that despite differences in personality, private equity firms are all subject to similar incentives—to pump up the value to a third party of an entity they buy, by minimizing expenses and maximizing EBITDA (an indirect measure of cash generated by the company), and then to sell it to someone who will pay them more than they paid for it. And that is true enough. It is equally true that private equity firms extract money from owned companies prior to sale, through fees and special dividends. They often claim that this is compensation for providing guidance, a bogus claim, since except in rare instances those who work at private equity firms have no idea how to run a business (although often those who run the business also have no idea how to run a business), because financial engineering is a completely different skill set from running a business. Hubris is the defining characteristic of private equity, but nemesis never arrives, because of the political power of the financial engineering class.

One might legitimately ask, given that private equity has so many cretins in it, why did I sell to private equity? Because I wanted the money, of course. It so happened that the buyer was the bidder most aligned with all stakeholder interests, not just my interests, although the shift from a firm run by a single man to one run by a larger entity necessarily results in some change, disadvantaging some stakeholders and advantaging others. To be fair to me (something I never fail to do), I should mention that I distributed around ten million dollars to my employees, for although successful entrepreneurship almost always centers on the work of one indispensable man, he cannot do it without others, and the laborer is worthy of his hire. But I would have sold to a greaseball private equity company if that was what got me the most money, if I am being honest. The official mission statement of my company was “The purpose of this company is to put sweet cash in the pocket of Charles Haywood,” and so it turned out. That’s all there is to it. I’m avaricious, not so much for cash as the marker of success, but for what cash will let me do. Perhaps this merely proves I am part of the rot of modern America.

So, of Glass House. As with many books in the genre that combines social analysis with business analysis, the book is somewhat confusing, because it hops around in time and among people. But the basic story is relatively simple. Once upon a time, glass manufacture (not of windows, but of articles) built the modern version of the town of Lancaster, which is some distance southeast of Columbus. The city has plentiful supplies of natural gas, which made it, starting in the late nineteenth century, an ideal place for glass manufacture, an energy-intensive process. The biggest of these glass manufacturers was, and the only one left in or near Lancaster is, Anchor Hocking. Through the lens of Anchor Hocking, Alexander concisely explains glass manufacture, a heavy industrial process requiring hard and dangerous work. This Lancaster was a successful town, and in many ways the image of America in the 1950s, a decade that we are told now was awful, but which was in reality an awesome decade, and the last decade before America hurtled into the pit. Any person in Lancaster could, with a modicum of hard work, have a more than decent life. He wouldn’t be rich (nobody was truly rich in Lancaster, nor were there sharp class distinctions—Anchor Hocking executives drank at the same bars as men who worked the machines), but he would be able to raise a successful family and have a successful life, as success was once defined.

As with many companies, in the 1970s Anchor Hocking ran into trouble. Some of that was the sclerosis that affected many American companies of the era, the result of decades of little competition. In 1982, Carl Icahn bought a block of stock in Anchor Hocking and threatened that he would try to replace management, that is, directors and officers. What he wanted was “greenmail”—to have management repurchase his shares at an above-market price, a practice that is bizarrely not illegal (though a special tax is now imposed on such payments, making them less common today). He got what he wanted, starting a cycle of Anchor Hocking being led around, like a bull with a ring through its nose, by one “investment” firm after another.

The Icahn episode demonstrates a key underlying structural problem with all corporate entities—what is called the “agency problem,” the separation between ownership and control. Those who made the decisions for Anchor Hocking, the officers and directors, were not significant owners, or owners at all in many cases. That means they made decisions with other people’s money, and they could benefit themselves, here by keeping their jobs, at the expense of the owners, the stockholders. Managers say they act (as they are legally required) to benefit the stockholders, not to keep their jobs and perks. But that is at best a half-truth; rare is the manager devoid of self-interest. The agency problem is an eternal challenge for any firm, but in a firm that needs reform, it ensures that reform is unlikely to come except under extreme pressure—often in the form of being bought by private equity. Whatever may be the deficiencies of private equity, as an owner private equity firms take direct, immediate action to benefit the owner, largely removing the agency problem. This means that managers who are fat, lazy, and stupid stay in charge until private equity forces changes; this all-or-nothing approach tends to lead to undesirable outcomes for those who work for or rely on the continued stable existence of a company.

Alexander mostly ignores it, but it is entirely true that American industry in the 1970s and 1980s had fallen behind and needed reform, living large off two decades of riding high and made resistant to pressure by the ever-increasing pie allowing everyone to do well. It is no surprise this led to complacence; that reaction is simply the default for most human creations, whether firms or governments. With the right leadership, complacence can sometimes be avoided, but that leadership is extremely rare. Such sclerosis was before extreme globalization and the ideology of free trade wiped out our industrial capacity, though lean and hungry foreign competitors already were starting to enforce some discipline in the 1970s. (The classic example of this dynamic was the auto industry, whose lunch was eaten by the Japanese.) Anchor Hocking, however, wasn’t much subject to foreign competition (it’s expensive to ship glass across the ocean, although Anchor Hocking did sell overseas, and some foreign glass, especially Mexican, competes in America), and had enormous amounts of difficult-to-replicate tacit knowledge (something Matthew B. Crawford writes very well about). Thus, while it no doubt had become somewhat inefficient, it continued to operate adequately, and it spent money on necessary capital improvements while offering good wages and benefits to workers and being closely tied to the continued success of Lancaster. It’s hard to tell from this book, but there’s no real indication that Anchor Hocking in the 1980s needed to do much differently than it already was. Icahn was looking for a quick buck, not to improve the company.

Coincident with rising sclerosis among American firms, however, was the rise of libertarian economic ideas, epitomized by Milton Friedman, with his idea that the sole purpose of any firm was to make a profit for its stockholders. This was a rejection of the stakeholder view of corporate decision making, in which the corporation is run for the benefit of all those with an interest in its success, in particular the employees (though this concept is too often stretched far from real stakeholders). I used to have quite a bit of sympathy with Friedman’s idea, but it’s become clear that such an imbalanced focus is one of the drivers of American economic decay. On the other hand, it’s also true that the agency problem is real, that managers very commonly line their own pockets and protect their own jobs and perks while lying that they are doing so for all the stakeholders. And more recently, a great many managers have destroyed enormous firm value for all stakeholders by using their firms to virtue signal with leftist agitation, another example of the agency problem, and the most pernicious one yet. The question, again, is where and how to strike the balance in deciding for whose benefit a firm should be operated.

Certainly, we don’t need total laissez faire. The bizarre idea that many supposed conservatives advance, that corporations should be free to do what they want, even monopolistic ones that use their massive power to aggressively advance left-wing goals, is just that—bizarre. It ignores that corporations, which are creatures of the state, are told all the time what they can and cannot do—but only to advance left-wing goals, like forcing small businesses to bake celebration cakes for homosexual “weddings.” The sooner this idea of keeping hands off corporate entities dies, the better. When I am in charge, corporations will work to advance, or at least not hinder, the societal goals of Foundationalism, or they will be dissolved, and regardless of that, no giant corporations at all will be allowed, following Tim Wu’s neo-Brandeisianism.

As for Anchor Hocking, the next four decades of its history were one of decline combined with endless financial engineering machinations. More investments by raiders who demanded short-term returns at the expense of all other stakeholders; spinoffs that lined the pockets of a few; declining quality and declining sales; cutting investment in capital improvement in an attempt to raise cash flow; and all the usual common events in the many American industries choked by financial engineering. The long-standing ties of the company’s managers to the town frayed and then severed. An endless churn of new owners and managers became the new norm, in the corrosive manner modern corporate America endorses. The union was cowed and forced to repeatedly retrench wages and benefits, threatened with shutdowns otherwise. Public money was extracted by one owner after another; school funding was cut in order to meet the demands of voracious new owners. The left-wing critics of the “greed is good” attitude, which tried to justify dishonesty and the quick buck, were, it turns out, correct.

Notably, one short-term owner of the company was Cerberus Capital Management, of which one Stephen Feinberg, a top economic advisor to Donald Trump, is CEO. This simple fact explains a lot about how Trump’s term in office went. Feinberg is laughably described in his Wikipedia profile as a “businessman”; nothing could be further from the truth. He’s a parasitical extractor of value created by others. As Robert Nisbet said, rootless men always betray.

One result of this ruination wrought by financial engineering was that working at Anchor Hocking, which used to be the goal of most young people in the town, became a low-prestige option, where nobody ambitious wanted to work given that upward opportunities were few and the company might shut down at any time. By when this book was written, in 2016, Anchor Hocking was still around, shrunken (as it is to this day, though it seems to be a big seller of bottles for premium liquor), but sadly diminished as a pillar of Lancaster, which itself was, not coincidentally, also sadly diminished. Alexander weaves, among the business discussion, profiles of local residents, not connected to the glass industry, mostly drug addicts. There’s a little too much of this, which becomes repetitive. All you need to know is that like most towns, especially in this area of the country, drug use is ubiquitous and hugely destructive, and a very large percentage of the population cycles in and out of the criminal justice system. The details don’t really matter; what matters is that this is indicative of a blasted and destroyed society. Did that have to happen? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The root symptom of Lancaster-style societal destruction is the alienation and isolation that characterizes most of America today, even in economically-thriving areas. From that follow numerous secondary harms. Alienation led to the destruction of the virtues that used to be the norm, and which were enforced by the community. Chief among those disappeared virtues were hard work and thrift; as Alexander says, now “Modesty was out; acquisitiveness was in.” As everywhere, consumerism, usually of cheap Chinese crap, substituted for community, aided by easy credit and easy bankruptcy (and more recently by our government printing money). (If you need more proof of the attitude this creates, I passed a bus stop bench the other day, printed with an advertisement, “Bankruptcy By Phone!”) As the community corroded, those on the edges fell out, creating new edges, that also fell out. As a result, it became increasingly difficult for businesses to find good workers, further fueling decline. Numerous other indicia of decay, such as illegitimacy, soared. The result is that Lancaster today is a drug-addled and poverty-stricken town, where most people who work are employed in health care, an industry pumped up by the vicious cycle of poor health leading to yet more social decay leading to more poor health, and where the only people in Lancaster with good jobs are those who work in Columbus and commute, who have no time to participate in the community.

Many locals blame government handouts for the decay . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Evie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Book Was: Informative, Heart-Rending, A MUST-Read for 2017 in America. If you read Hillbilly Elegy and/or Strangers In Their Own Land, you NEED to read this.

Content Rating: Rated-R for (quoted) Cursing, Drug Use, Racism, and Depression-Triggers for anyone with a sense of Empathy.

Maturity Rating: High Maturity. While mostly a flowing read, you need to come into this with an open mind.

Would I recommend it? -- YES. Everyone should read this, but especially those in America who could not understand why certain groups clung to populism so fiercely that they voted for a billionaire connected with Russia who vilified anyone who was not white. who has a disability, who is a woman, etc. Anyone who wonders why someone would "vote against their own interests."

Review:

I heard about Glass House on NPR while driving to work. It covers the rich history of Lancaster, Ohio and its sincerely expert-level glass manufacturing which proved to be a source of not only good-paying jobs (with pensions! remember those?!) but also social cohesion, identity, and well-deserved praise. Then, the world happened. From leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, and private equity, Glass House details the downfall of Anchor/American Manufacturing and the ripple effects on society-- explaining the desperation, sometimes hostility, and overall distrust for "The System" that comes with the social contract enabling average Americans to live even average lives is shattered like glass falling to a factory floor. You absolutely want to read this.

Reviewer's Note: I was born in Miami, Florida, but a job transfer in the family brought me to grow up in East Tennessee. Being Hispanic but "looking white," I watched as family members who looked more foreign get different treatment. Being an "outsider," the locals' responses to me weren't great, but I avoided the worst even though I was relentlessly bullied in middle and high school. I went to public schools but did transfer to a larger high school as the closer institution didn't offer much for what I wanted as high-level courses were my goal to get into college. I wanted to go to college, but, more than anything, I wanted to "escape the state." I couldn't imagine why people were okay with growing old and dying within an hour's drive of where they were born-- and, given Tennessee's low-paying jobs and oppressive climate, I couldn't understand the logic of that kind of decision.

I referred to my Tennessee town as a "tar pit." The longer people stayed, the harder it seemed it was to get out. The cost of living was low-- but the job wages paid accordingly. There was one big employer in the area for people without advanced degrees-- my mom ended up there, my future step-dad worked there, and I even did a stint there. It wasn't manufacturing, but, had it left the area, I can only imagine the ripple effect that would have. But it never had the loyalty that Anchor had in Glass House

I moved to Los Angeles for college, and I've never left. It might be more expensive, but the opportunities, diversity, tolerance, and room for growth here cannot be compared to Tennessee. At the 2016 election, I couldn't understand why, though not the majority, many Americans in depressed areas voted for a billionaire with a horrible business record-- and, even after his cabinet became a more congested swap rather than a drained one, why they still support him. There is racism, there is anger against "The System" and "outsiders," but mostly there is a desperation to bring back a world and a way of life that simply doesn't exist anymore (and that can't be brought back, no matter what Trump says).

Do you know that feeling of sadness and depression when watching The Walking Dead or any other show/movie/story where the cast of characters is not only fighting to survive but also to reconstruct the world that was destroyed? Welcome to Lancaster.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glass houses, like hillbilly elegy and heartland, paint a grim picture of middle America.

I could disagree with he author about blaming Milton Friedman etc, but I want to address the structural fallacy that many on the right and the left miss.

The era after WW2 was a one-off.
Never again will this country enjoy such a concatenation of forces to bring it such prosperity.

Once that’s accepted, the idea that America is failing just demonstrates myopia. No, America is just sliding back to the mean. Of course, a hundred years ago there weren’t drugs, tv, and social media to sap the American spirit, and the young didn’t have to see how much better their grandparents had had it.

Tough times, indeed.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did I understand all the finance in this book? Nope. But it's desperately important to demystify the methods by which late capitalism (not immigration) defangs unions and enables opioid addiction.

[Nann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard Brian Alexander interviewed on NPR and immediately reserved the book at the library. This read like a horror story of impending doom.

Corporate takeovers occur for many reasons. Sometimes it's to consolidate industry rivals. Other times (most often nowadays) it's to make financiers even richer. Rarely is it to elevate the fortunes of the workers. Frequently it weakens once-proud brands, sometimes to the point of no return. That was the case for Anchor-Hocking Glass and its hometown of Lancaster, Ohio.

But beyond the spreadsheets I saw the erosion of social capital from what had once been called the All-American City. Alexander writes that from the 1930's through the 60's when Anchor-Hocking executives lived in Lancaster and raised their families alongside the glass workers they invested in their town. They supported the schools, the churches, the arts, the country club, and civic/service organizations. Their wives put their energy into everything from the PTA to the hospital auxiliary. When new owners and upper managers took over they didn't move to town -- they took, and took, and took from Anchor-Hocking but they did not give back.

I will be interested to see what Lancastrians say about Alexander's book, just as I was to find out what people in Middletown thought about J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. . . . And now, is someone going to write a cheerful book about an Ohio city?

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered where the current state of raging income inequality in America came from, this book is a good place to start.

It tells the story of a tight-knit Ohio town profiled by Forbes magazine in 1947. Back then, while there may have been uneasy tension between the owners of the town's largest employer, the Anchor Hocking Glass Company, and its unionized workers, they all lived within a few miles of each other, their kids all went to the same schools, their wives worked on the same civic projects together, and they all drank at the same bars.

That began to change when '80's corporate raiders set their sights on asset-rich Anchor. Over the next 35 years, a series of leveraged buyout shops and private equity firms began systematically "engineering maximum value for shareholders" at the expense of pretty much everyone else. As one distant corporate owner after another siphoned off cash from the company, the factory and the social fabric of the town around it fell into dangerous disrepair, leaving its residents easy prey for the current drug epidemic.

Author Brian Alexander is able to shed particular insight into the depths of Lancaster's issues because he was born and raised in the town. He weaves the tale of its unraveling through interviews with long-time residents, union leaders, after-school volunteers, glassworkers, business owners, drug dealers, users, and the cops who are desperately trying to keep the the exploding population of those last two under control.

Alexander's tale is also informed by interviews with Sam Solomon, a man brought in to be interim CEO of Anchor by one of its corporate overlords. Though Solomon had little idea of the mess he was stepping into when he took the job, he came to understand that Anchor could be a solid business if it was allowed to right itself without the burdens of all the debt and "consulting" fees its revolving door of owners had saddled it with.

While Lancaster may be a small town, the story Alexander tells is a much larger one. If the book has one flaw, it may be that he tries to tell a little too much of it in his attempt to explain what once existed in Lancaster, how it was lost, and how those who remain are struggling to bring it back. The ravage of drugs, the obsession of America with cheap prices, and the lack of residents' understanding of how the politicians they voted for enabled their town's destruction makes the picture Alexander paints a gloomy one. While it remains to be seen if Lancaster will reinvent itself and Anchor will survive, there is a sliver of hope in the impractical economics of importing kitchen bakeware, for if there is anything this book makes clear, it's that if production could be profitably shipped overseas, that's where it would already be.

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very fine introduction to the systemic decisions that can destroy lives, not to mention companies. I kept going from the book to the internet, looking up people and places mentioned in this book. My distrust of corporate raiders, private equity firms and neocapitalism has been reinforced. The means people use to abuse themselves and others continues to amaze. In ways the book is more depressing than hopeful. I read it as a compliment to "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Strangers in Their Own Land". I expect to re-read significant portions of this book.

[Jeffd134 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very powerful and thought provoking book. If this doesn't make you angry, not sure what will. Shows the myriad of actors involved in destroying an American town's economy and how the demands put on companies to appease shareholders in the short term rather than build for the long term contribute at least as much as globalization to these problems. The story is told in terms of how all levels of the community -- from the boardroom to skid row -- are affected as the social contract that we grew up with is replaced by greed, misconduct and incompetence.

[Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s not unusual to read about history that you lived through. However, it is much more intimate to read about history at a specific company that you lived through.

Familiar names of past co-workers and quick mentions of "offices being a windowless concrete cell of a room" and Burger on the Bricks bring back nostalgic memories. However, unfortunately in this book, that is for the most part, that is the extent of the happiness.

This really isn’t a story about Anchor Hocking a housewares company with a rich heritage in the Lancaster, Ohio. It is a story about the behind-the-scenes machinations of owners and unethical private equity companies whose management seems almost inconceivable to those who did not experience it. The author captures the events accurately to what I experienced for my time there (pages 75 thru 98). My tenure from 2002 to 2007 included 8 different bosses, 2 CEOs, and 1 bankruptcy. A sentence from the book that best captures the time was "nobody wanted the glassworkers or the shipper and customer service reps in the DC, or the people in Monaca, to lose their jobs, but the saga of Anchor wore everyone out" (page 89)

As bad as things were when I was there, nothing saddened me more than learning some of the unimaginable things that happened in the following years. "An executive who'd worked for the company since she was a teenager reported that after Cerberus, 'People told me that now I knew what the devil was like'. Then she worked for Monomoy" (page 98). For instance, an immigration raid by the government at Plant 1 in Lancaster as the company bussed in in illegal immigrants to work in the factory (page 143).

The book ends at present day. A few CEOs later, a new management regime, and new renewed hopes for a prospective future as The Oneida Group with Anchor Hocking and Oneida products. In 2016 the company had about three hundred employees who'd worked for the companies for at least twenty years. Anchor Hocking had about half a dozen employees who'd worked for the company for at least fifty years (page 279). These people are the heart of Anchor Hocking. Their commitment to the company and city despite what became routine commutes to hell and back. I continue to have utmost respect for them. Despite all the bailing wire jerry rigging the machinery, they are what continues to keep Anchor Hocking running.

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Alexander grew up in Lancaster, Ohio, an industrial town and home to the Anchor Hocking glassworks. This is far from the first book about declining industrial towns in the Midwest, but it may be the best. Alexander seems comfortable at every level of local society, from the country club to heroin addicts, and his insights into the arcanery of the Anchor Hocking business as it is attacked by successive waves of ever-more mediocre financial jackals from Wall Street is worthy of a Harvard MBA. He actually understands and resists the lies that these people tell.

It's a sad story. I disagree with Alexander that the fate of Anchor Hocking and the town turned with the jackals and the technocrats of the 1 percent. They are drawn by the smell of death. People move for the opportunity to work and make more money, as they did in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lancaster could be home to a glass company because poor farm workers with no skills could easily get jobs in the rough and cruel glass industry. Time and technology brings change, and people need to move on. The no-hoper opioid addicts would complain about the loss of community, but their brothers and sisters had long gone.

[Susan Rainwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was in college, my roommates and I drove 45 miles up Rt 33 to the charming town of Lancaster, Ohio. There, at the Anchor Hocking factory store, we bought glassware for our apartment and Christmas presents for our family. It remains a fond memory.

Glass House is the story of what happened to that charming town when 20th & 21st corporate raiders and private equity companies decided to destroy Anchor Hocking for their own personal gain. It represents hundreds of other cases of American businesses destroyed for short term profit.

These raiders were inspired by Milton Friedman's doctrine of shareholder value and Ayn Randian view that there was no such thing as a social contract between business and the community in which it resided. The result is the destruction of not only Lancaster's economy, but most of its social institutions, and the descent into the drug economy by the working class.

This book should be required reading for everyone in public office, particularly those who think this kind of predatory capitalism has no consequences.

[Rachel Blakeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, however with a two-star rating I was clearly disappointed. I was optimistic about it after hearing the author interviewed on Fresh Air. And with my interest in stories from the Rust Belt I thought this could be a mashup of "Dreamland" and "Hillbilly Elegy." It was not.

Far too much time was spent on the corporate ownership of Anchor Hocking in a way that never really moved the story forward. The stories of the residents were interesting at times but never had the personal depth I wanted (see above titles for good examples of that). In all this book didn't have that magical string to pull the reader through. Time was misspent and as another reviewer said, I just didn't learn much after nearly 300 pages. Listen to the Fresh Air interview for all the best parts. I can't recommend this one.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Due to some very poor editing Glass Houses is two books in one. One is good and the other is great, but because they don't mesh together the overall product is merely good.

The sections about the people of Lancaster, Ohio are generally good and at their best are reminiscent of David Simon's excellent book The Corner. However, too many people with not enough depth made the local aspect of the book a distraction from the better conceived macro viewpoint.

The sections about private equity firms, the economy in general and Anchor Hocking specifically are excellent. These sections are easily the best of their kind in anything I've read in general nonfiction. The vast majority of my kindle highlights are from these parts of the book.

[Ang · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was...not-that-great. I was really looking forward to it, and...I feel like I don't understand anything more than I did before I read this book. I also think the 1% economy part is a little misleading; though maybe that's just my lack of understanding coming into play.

Also, this was leaden, in terms of pace. I think it could have moved faster. Anyway, sad that this wasn't as good as I hoped.

[Keenan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a sad look at the downfall of Lancaster, Ohio due to economic and political changes from the Reagan/Friedman era until 2016. Written by someone who grew up in Lancaster but moved away to find opportunity. His interviews are stark and heart wrenching. The scourge of opioids is well documented. It centers around the major glass manufacturer and its demise due to corporate pirating. I am sure this story could be told in many small towns over the last 40 years. A very important read in my opinion.

[MM Suarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Lancaster's social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow motion terrorism of pirate capitalism."

That's it in a nutshell, that's what 42 years of applied "Friedman Doctrine" gets us, to echo the sentiments of another Goodreads reader; F--k Milton Friedman!!!

[Erikka · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hard for me to read because it's about my hometown. I went to these places, knew these stories, and have personally met about ten of the people mentioned. That's eerie as hell, by the way. But what made it so difficult is that I loved my hometown. I have mostly fond memories, not of my childhood per se, but of the town as a character in it. I loved the fair, the annual arts festival, hanging out at the mall with my friends (although the lady's quote on pg 182 about the Gap being too high-end is so on point I laughed out loud). It was my place and I knew every little part of it. I worked at the after school center that features heavily in this story. And that's where the story turns, because those kids were suffering. They were poor, they were not always cared for, they were often unwashed or underfed, and they weren't always loved. So when I picked up a book about the 1% machinations slowly bringing down the number one employer in that part of town, I seethed. I think he sums up the plot of this story perfectly (and I'm paraphrasing): the 1% come in and buy companies, they wipe them out, the workers aren't even considered in any dealings, they lose their income or insurance, and then they don't receive care they need and often resort to illegal drugs or prescription drug abuse as a pain relief. I could put a shameless plug for universal healthcare here (because it's the answer to this), but the people of Lancaster are hyperconservative and would bawk at that suggestion. It's part of the reason I left.

He makes a brilliant point in the last chapter that small town America tends to vote conservative because the conservative candidates claim to support small town America (or "real America", as if the rest of us in cities are made of synthetic plastic and resin). However, all conservative policies completely shit on small town America. Withholding healthcare from underpaid workers, not wanting additional taxes that would help improve education and infrastructure, giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, and so forth. I will never understand how that much cognitive dissonance can persist. Politicians, in both parties, don't care about small town America. They just don't. And this book, with it's dual dive into workers struggling to get by and addicts struggling to stay alive, drills that point home.

I also was taken aback by the beauty of this paragraph, which starts out describing the punch-and-hammer technique for testing the strength of anchor Hocking baking dishes. "... If the glass had been melted, formed, and tempered just right, it would shatter along lines of stress. You can see the stress lines in an intact dish by holding it under polarized light. You can't see them with the naked eye." The astonishing clarity of comparing Lancaster to the resilience of the glass it manufactures is brilliant.


There are some negatives to this book. Some of the acquisitions and trade chapters about Anchor Hocking were boring as crap unless you're an economics major (I skimmed them for their impact on the workers). The story isn't linear in time, so its very confusing in parts. And I wish there had been more about the future of the city. The reflection on halcyon days is great, but even vague predictions of what could save the town of my childhood would have been better.

I met Brian Alexander when he came to discuss this book at my library. He was very interesting, down to earth, and really seemed passionate about the state of our hometown. I am glad I finally sat down and read this, because while it breaks my heart, it was also a great reflection on a town I loved and would give anything to love again. I agree with another reviewer: put down Hillbilly Elegy and pick this up if you really want to understand the state of our nation right now.

[Nancy Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a follow to "The Jungle." And it was purely accidental ... I tend to rotate science, economics, classics, mysteries so I don't get stuck on one thing ... this was non-fiction and it was the next on the shelf.
And if you think "The Jungle" is depressing, this will make you want to just chuck it all in, if you're working or middle class and still chasing the American Dream. Because this book is about a town where the American Dream really IS dead, and it's just an example of post-industrial towns all over the U.S.
The fact that award-winning author Brian Alexander grew up in this town allows him to take the reader into the very heart of its history, culture and the hopelessness wrought upon its people by private equity firms and corporations which certainly are NOT people, regardless of what the Supreme Court tells us. "Monomoy sent what was left o Lancaster's once-grand, 110 year old employer into bankruptcy court while it made off with millions and the employees walked their wages and benefits backward in time. Lancaster's social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow-motion terrorism of pirate capitalism."
In the context of this book, the phrase is not hyperbole. This town, from the country club set to the working classes, took a screwing, while the firms that pass around ownership of its main employer, Anchor Hocking, strip it of its assets and pay themselves huge consulting fees while letting the capital equipment fall into appalling disrepair. If the treatment this community received is not a crime, it is nonetheless surely a sin.
The book isn't just about the company, but about the effects of the demise of the manufacturing sector in the US. One of the questions asked later in the book (and answered very well by the writer) is, if it's so bad, why not just rent a U-Haul and leave? (And where, pray tell, does a middle-aged factory worker GO to start a better life? Buffalo? Reading? Allentown? Binghamton? Places with the same hopelessness, unwed tattooed mothers in Walmart with their food stamps, drug problems? Mexico?? CHINA?? My words, not his.)
If I could shave off a half or a quarter of my fifth star, I would, because I do think the author gives short shrift to globalization as significant cause of workers' woes. Although glass products are heavy and harder to import from abroad, manufacturing labor in general has been weakened by loss of jobs via offshoring.
Nevertheless, it's an eye-opening book, tracing, in addition to the company, the lives of many members of the community and how the schools, drug problems, and unity of the townspeople are affected by the mismanagement of the company that has been the hub of their town for so long.

[Elizabeth Stolar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must-read, especially if you are interested in the state of our country and the anger of the working class. This is actually better than Hillbilly Elegy -- both books written by native Ohioans about their hometowns, although Hillbilly Elegy is more strictly memoir whereas this book is more of a journalistic piece. Although this is why I knock off a star -- the author writes about his hometown, but struggles to keep the reporting at a distance. But this isn't acknowledged, and often the book 'breaks the fourth wall' so to speak, yet in other places ignores the personal connection the town has to the author. This might have worked better had it been written by a journalist without a direct connection to the town. Also there were parts that were confusing -- like they were things the author knew, but a reader unfamiliar with the town would not know. There were also many people discussed in the book and I found it hard to keep some of them straight.

All in all, though, this is an excellent description of what has gone wrong in our country. The simple fact is that LBOs and other similar financial maneuvers should be outlawed, as they have directly dismantled and destroyed our towns and our society. The government has decreed that corporations are people, but they allow them to get away with refusing to pay the social costs and encourage them not to become a part of the fabric of the community but rather to rip it apart. There is no reason it has to be this way.

[AngelaGay Kinkead · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am an Appalachian woman who grew up in what is now the Rust Belt. This book was enlightening (though I got a little bogged down in the financial explanations) and it's sad. No happy ending. I grew up in one of the "glass cities" (Jeannette, PA) mentioned in the early part of the book.

And I'm a follower of Jesus. We need more humility and justice and grace. Yes, we people make bad choices sometimes, as this investigative book illustrates (education, drugs, relationships), but as another reviewer said, "why do Appalachians continue to believe empty promises, especially from wealthy businessmen?" What made the manufacturing and industrial jobs vanish from our towns and cities? It wasn't immigration, lack of work ethic or . . . It was greed and injustice and arrogance on the part of the financial "giants" who continue to influence and advise. October 2020. A timely read.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This the story of a small Ohio town that for decades was the home of Anchor Glass. It tells of the beginnings of the company, how good this company was to it's employees then it moves onto it's downfall in the 80's. The deregulation and tax cuts for businesses back in the 80's destroyed so many towns because that help did "not" go to the every day people but the wealthy businessmen and made them wealthier.

This book tells what happened to so many good businesses in America and why corporate greed has destroyed working class families, small towns, and our product quality. People tend to just blame our outsourcing....sadly we need to take a closer look at the greed of the rich Americans that have destroyed our businesses for the every day people.

[Chip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, the author expanded my limited knowledge of private equity and how it squeezes our skilled laborers. Alexander explains the complex equity arrangements in understandable analogies, but some of it is opaque in a way that is clearly by design in that industry. Devastatingly sad how corporate greed wins over and over again. A great tribute to the tireless work of those investing in the community like Michele Ritchlin. Proud to know you Michele and good luck to you.