Who Killed Ohio?
Lancaster was the all-American town. Then Wall Street got there.
In 1947, Forbes sent a reporter to Lancaster, Ohio — a thriving city of factory workers, busy church potlucks, and front-porch civics — and declared it the pinnacle of the American free enterprise system. The ideal of what this country could be. You already know how this story ends, though. You’ve watched it end, in slow motion, for thirty years. What you may not know is who ended it.
That answer is more specific, more documented, and more damning than the usual complaint about generic globalization and the dying Midwest. Brian Alexander went back home to Lancaster to find out. What he discovered became Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town — which we’re happy to call one of the most important American books of the last decade.
For Episode 18, Joey and Haroon brought Brian on Avenue M to talk about what we in America have done to ourselves…. and what we do next.
It Wasn’t China, You See. It Was New York.
The conventional story about “forgotten cities” like Lancaster goes something like this: factories moved overseas (because they had to), automation took out the rest, and the towns that made America got tragically but inevitably left behind by a perfect storm of impersonal economic forces no one could do much about. It’s a story that makes you sad but doesn’t make you angry — because there’s no villain, just history.
Brian Alexander didn’t accept that story.
Lancaster’s biggest employer, the Anchor Hocking Glass Company — once the world’s largest glass tableware maker — wasn’t defeated by cheaper foreign goods or outmaneuvered robots. Anchor Hocking was systematically looted by a succession of private equity firms operating out of Manhattan, who purchased the company, loaded it with debt, extracted fees, moved the headquarters out of state, and walked away richer even while the town collapsed.
Glass manufacturing is quite structurally resistant to outsourcing. Anchor Hocking could have survived foreign competition.
What it couldn’t survive was being treated as a line item on a balance sheet by men who had never set foot in Lancaster and never would, by Americans who didn’t care for much of the rest of America, whose belief systems privileged wealth and individual accomplishment over any other goal.
The Opioid Ward and the Ballot Box
Glass House — and our conversation with Brian — demands we define what we mean when we say “community.” Lancaster, at its height, wasn’t just inputs and outputs. It was a tapestry of mutual obligations: plant managers who sat on the hospital board, executives whose wives ran the school fundraisers, workers who coached little league with their supervisors. The company and the town were not easily separated. Private equity didn’t just strip the company. It severed those connections, one by one, often without meaning to — because the people making the decisions had no stake in them. They didn’t live there. They didn’t pray there. They didn’t bury anyone there.
For Joey and Haroon, that raises a question that goes beyond economics: what does faith have to say about the obligations that come with ownership? With wealth? With power over people’s lives? The religious traditions that built places like Lancaster had answers to those questions. What happens when those traditions lose their hold on the people making the decisions? Brian doesn’t let Lancaster off easy, either. The book traces how the collapse of stable work fed the opioid crisis that ripped through the town — and how, with bitter irony, the people most devastated by the policies of the 1980s continued to vote for the politicians who championed them.
Because the alternative explanations — the ones that would implicate the system itself — were never really offered to them. This is the Ohio we live in. Brian grew up here. He came back. He sat with the cops and fentanyl addicts and factory workers and the man trying to save the company from the people destroying it. He wrote it all down. And then we asked him what he would say to the people of Lancaster now — this was one of the most unexpectedly emotional and visceral episodes we’ve recorded, which does what we always hoped to: Bring facts, feelings and faith together. It’s Episode 18: Breakdown and Belonging!
Start Here
You can watch our full conversation with Brian on Avenue M’s YouTube channel:
Of course, you can always listen in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts:
Glass House is available wherever books are sold.
The irony of buying a book about the death of local community from Amazon is not lost on us. So if you’re ordering online, consider picking up a copy from Bookshop or Barnes and Noble; if you’re in Cincinnati, we also recommend the incredible Joseph-Beth (who also have a location in Lexington, Kentucky.)
P.S. This December, St. Martin’s releases Brian’s next book, The Mayor: One Poor City’s Fight to Bring Back Government and Save the Nation’s Soul. We are already excited.
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Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber.