Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

by Eliese Colette Goldbach

Train tracks divide the drained and dreary earth, and the brown water of the Cuyahoga River slogs toward the mouth of Lake Erie.

Like a lot of kids who grow up in Cleveland, Ohio, I mostly wanted to leave.

We would travel far and wide to give ourselves culture. We would attend colleges in legitimate cities like San Francisco or Boston. The real world happened in other cities and other towns, and we wanted to build our lives somewhere—anywhere—but here.

As a native-born Clevelander, I had always viewed the mill as part of my landscape.

Rush Limbaugh was talking about all of the bad things Democrats were doing in America. I was too young to know much about the world, but I was drawn to Limbaugh’s energy. He had conviction and charisma, like a preacher struck by the spirit, and I wanted to believe the things he said, even if I didn’t understand them.

At the very least, I grasped the crux of Limbaugh’s message: Being a Republican was good, and being a Democrat was not. My family believed some version of the same, except we added a heavy dose of religion into the mix. We were Republicans because God wanted us to be Republicans. Satan had corrupted the Democrats by tricking them into the sins of abortion, homosexuality, and, worst of all, feminism. Now the Democrats were trying to destroy everything that was good and moral in American society, and it was our job as Republicans to oppose them.

but I already understood that my generation had been promised a better future than the one contained inside the sulfurous buildings of Cleveland’s industrial valley.

which didn’t jibe with the American ethos. We were a people who put our faith in hard work. Earn what you have. Struggle to the top. Pull up your bootstraps and build yourself from nothing. A true American passion needed to be conquered, like the ascent up a mountain, so I forsook engineering for

“What does Cleveland produce?” “What do you mean?” I said. “You know, Maine’s got lobsters. Hawaii’s got coffee. Virginia’s got peanuts. What about Cleveland? What comes out of Cleveland?” The man’s question reeked of sarcasm. It was less of a question and more of a challenge. I dare you to find something important that comes out of Cleveland, Ohio. I sipped my whiskey and thought for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. What did Cleveland produce? What made us important? What separated us from the rest? I couldn’t think of anything, so I did what Clevelanders do best. I made a joke. “What comes out of Cleveland?” I said. “Failure.”

There’s an unspoken rule among Clevelanders: Those who’ve been born and bred in the city can joke

about its blunders, but outsiders had better keep their mouths shut. “Listen,” I said, “you don’t know shit about Cleveland.”

I felt torn about my city, my home, my heritage. I did feel stuck in Cleveland, but I also recognized the beauty of my hometown. It’s a city nicknamed “the Mistake on the Lake.” It’s an underdog town marked by a spirit of dogged perseverance. Its people have a unique breed of gritty optimism in the face of dire odds.

It might not seem like much—after all, it’s just sports—except it’s not just

sports in Cleveland. It’s a way of looking at the world.

it had never occurred to me that I didn’t know shit about Cleveland, either. My hometown was more than just a city

While people in cities like San Francisco or Boston might think of the flame as an embarrassment, it’s something more than that to us. It’s jobs and tax dollars. It indicates a thriving economy. If that flame is burning, steelworkers say, then it means that Cleveland is doing all right. The flame is very much a part of our history and our identity. It’s a steady reminder that some things can stand the test of time, even in a world where nothing is built to last.

I was willing to go wherever the Spirit sent me, so long as he didn’t send me to Cleveland, and I was willing to do Christ’s bidding, so long as he gave me something in return.

Growing up Catholic had given me a sense of wonder, and I believed in the magic of it all: the miracles, the visions, the unlikely tales embellished over generations.

We both stayed home from church that morning, which was practically unheard of in our family, and I waited as my mother sewed the blanket in the basement.

The apocalypse would happen in my lifetime, and abortion was to blame.

After all, evil was already in my midst. Millions of Americans were under Satan’s spell. My parents called them Democrats, and they were traipsing blindly toward the “end of days.”

Democrats wanted to destroy American democracy by instituting global socialism, whatever that meant. They wanted to ruin our economy with NAFTA, whatever that

Sherro brown anti nafta

Most steelworkers didn’t know how steel was made. Not really, anyway. Everyone knew the few steps they were personally responsible for, but most couldn’t explain the finer details.

spent my whole life in Cleveland, but I’d learned about the mill from the sidelines. I read about the Rust Belt in books and magazines. I heard about it from pundits and economics professors, and I’d come to believe that the Rust Belt was the collection of tidy metaphors that everyone else wanted it to be.

In a matter of months, reporters would be looking at the Rust Belt and scratching their heads. They would search through their best metaphors to explain what had happened, and I would think back to the story that Jack told me at the beginning of orientation. I was wrong to think that the story didn’t impart a message. Jack hadn’t been quick enough to save his friend from the wheel of the crane, and he hadn’t walked outside to save his dog, and whatever guilt connected those two events didn’t deserve to be dressed up or watered down. Sometimes you just had to let things be what they were.

Steel. Steel comes out of Cleveland. Tons and tons of steel. It’s not sexy. It’s not exotic. It’s dirty and hot and loud, but somebody has to do it. We feed the appliance industry, and we supply the auto industry. We make the types of steel that will be transformed into frames and innards and underbellies. We make the strong stuff. The TRIP grades. The dual-phase steels. The HSLA steel. We make the types of steel that don’t collapse under pressure. What we make isn’t glamorous, but it keeps you safe. What we make isn’t fancy, but it keeps you moving.

No one had ever warned me about these kinds of situations, so I tried to remedy the problem in the only way I knew how right then.

While we tended toward Democratic candidates in national elections, we sometimes found appealing Republican candidates on the local level. In many ways, we could be described by the dirtiest word in American politics: moderates.

Steel had left Cleveland for good, at least in large part. I was told time and again that the industry had packed its bags and headed for China. In college, I noticed that the orange flame still shot from the stacks of the old mills, but I figured that Cleveland couldn’t possibly be a competitive producer in the market. If anything, the flames from the mill symbolized a breed of stagnation that typified the Rust Belt. We weren’t innovating. We weren’t moving forward. We weren’t embracing the booming tech industry. Cleveland was a city built on sad stories, or so I thought. I didn’t yet realize that we were also a city of comebacks.

Mittal Steel eventually became ArcelorMittal Steel, which is the largest steel-producing company in the world. While the Cleveland mill has gone through

some rough patches since then, especially during the Great Recession, its doors remain open. It has a reputation for making the innovative high-strength steels used in the auto industry, and it also has a reputation for making steel more quickly and efficiently than other American mills. We might have been down and out, but we did what we do best. We kept chugging quietly along.

Be afraid of immigrants, who rape your women and steal your jobs. Be afraid of minorities, who want to bring everyone down. Be afraid of the men and women who practice Islam; they will kill you in a heartbeat. Be afraid of the globalists, the feminists, the socialists, the Democrats. It seemed that Trump sensed the anxiety in the Rust Belt, so he gave its people a few places to point their fingers. In reality, however, the source of our anxiety was far more elusive than we allowed ourselves to believe.

already got the sense that the rich, powerful people who ran the company thought we should be grateful for being owned.

According to the union contract, the steelworkers at the Cleveland mill were entitled to a quarterly bonus that was based on the company’s net profits. But every quarter the company did some fancy accounting. They would declare massive profits to investors on Wall Street, and then they would turn around and tell us that there were no profits to be

each person would have been given a bonus of approximately thirty thousand dollars.

The real enemies bringing us down aren’t easy to isolate, so Trump gave people a few targets to blame: It’s the immigrants, the Democrats, the Muslims. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Hillary Clinton. It’s an enemy with a name and a face.

His angry far-right politics masked the vulnerabilities that pervaded his life, and his guns gave him the illusion of control. He was primed for a man like Trump, who gave credence to his fears. The immigrants were at our borders, and the Muslims were at our doorsteps,

Hillary Clinton had a chokehold on democracy. When Trump told everyone that the next disaster was already upon us, my father was too afraid to ignore the message.

He was the kind of guy who didn’t let a devastating loss defeat him. He continued to create. He continued to give. He continued to make models and move forward. More important, he didn’t let a few bullies take his passion. That’s what made him Cleveland.

He didn’t see our resilience, and he boiled us down to our worst parts. He viewed industrial workers as a down-and-out people, and he let us believe that being down-and-out was our only identity.

He crippled the good in us, which meant that he never really understood the delicate beauty of everything we were fighting to defend.

I thought of myself as a soldier for Jesus and a champion of the faith, which also meant that I was a defender of American freedom and democracy.

“That’s interesting,” the second lawyer said. The condescension in his voice made me cringe. I had seen the video bytes that news stations used of industrial workers, and it always seemed as if the reporters

chose the most bumbling, inarticulate people from the crowd. The blue-collar worker was less educated and less intelligent in the eyes of coastal America, and I assumed that the lawyers thought the same thing about me.

Clevelanders were getting excited—and nervous—about their moment in the spotlight. The convention was our chance to show the rest of the country that we were just as competent and beautiful as any other city in America. Maybe the people in New York and LA would finally realize that Clevelanders weren’t a bunch of Midwestern bumpkins. Maybe the people from Washington, D.C., would see that our hometown was more than a heap of rusted remains.

They believed Trump was just like them, even though the billionaire had inherited a fortune, and I couldn’t understand why so many people refused to see reality for what it was.

He was an angry, unpredictable weight tumbling at random, and I felt like the small, hapless thing that had gotten in his way. This loving God had granted the trivial wish of a little boy who probably didn’t even appreciate the gesture, and yet he had taken the world away from me. He saved the sandcastle, but he didn’t spare my body. He changed the tides for the sake of a child, but he let my dream of the religious life fall at the feet of two men who didn’t blink twice at my pain.

“Oh,” she said softly, “we don’t really like this pope.” “Yeah,” my father agreed after gulping down his food, “this pope is just another Marxist who’s pushing a leftist agenda.”

I enrolled at a much more liberal college on the east side of Cleveland. During my time there, I befriended a lot of Democrats.

They were ready to forsake the pope for him, and yet they ignored the daughter who had been hurt by the misogynistic views that Trump condoned.