I’m sick of the nostalgia for the manufacturing jobs of the past. This nostalgia is borne, not of actual memories of that past, but of utter ignorance of it.
Nearly every adult male in my family when I was growing up worked in a job classified as manufacturing or construction – and the lifetime experience wasn’t especially elevating.
These men worked with their hands. They wore thick denim, along with steel-toed boots, even in the blistering gulf-coast summertime. They sweated profusely through their work clothes, and at days’ end smelled pungently of it. (I can still recall how my dad smelled when he returned home each evening from work at the shipyard. It was very salty. What I wouldn’t give to hug him just one more time as I did as a boy.)
These men had 30-minute lunch breaks during which they ate cold-cuts-on-white-bread sandwiches and Oreo cookies pulled from lunch pails that their wives filled for them in the early hours of the morning. At the end of their work days, their work was seldom done. At home, they too often had to repair the family car or fix a leaky pipe in the family bathroom. They earned enough money to keep their families fed, clothed, and housed – but not enough to take fancy vacations, to send their children to pricey colleges, to pay for many meals at restaurants, or even to hire repair services to fix their cars or household plumbing.
But, indeed, these men physically built things: My father; my maternal grandfather; all but two of my uncles; the great majority of my male second cousins; the fathers of literally every one of my neighborhood friends and of most of my grade-school and high-school classmates – they worked with their hands and with winches and wrenches and welding rods to manufacture stuff. (My paternal grandfather was different: After working for a few years as a welder in New Orleans, he spent most of his career driving a city bus.) More than one of these manufacturing workers was missing a digit or two – and on at least one occasion that I remember, four. (My dad was lucky: He died with all twenty digits.) Yet each and every one of these men – my father included – would have thought their children to be lunatic if their children aspired to work in those same or similar occupations.
Intellectuals such as Oren Cass, Michael Lind, and Ron Vara Peter Navarro – and billionaire real-estate moguls such as Donald Trump – are no doubt sincere in their belief that ordinary Americans today long to toil away in manufacturing jobs of the sort that were common in the mid-20th century. But almost no one who had actual exposure to, and experience with, such jobs shares such a crushing – indeed, stupid – aspiration.
