Made in USA: The East St. Louis Story | Circa 2003

the following is a special presentation of ket see made in USA is made possible by a grant from the estate of Nancy George which reminds you to include public television in your will or trust additional funding is provided by the Philip Cowan group and the generous support of the members of ket see these are the ruins the remains of something that was once gigantic and powerful this was once one of America's great industrial centers East st. Louis Illinois whose rise and fall were complex and dramatic it's not pretty but it was never pretty at its peak this was America's back alley and boiler room East st. Louis was what the American industrial machine looked like under the hood and living in the midst of it the workers and their families there were the Croatians and the Ukrainians and the Slovak sand the poles and the Russians and my family came from the south like most blacks came from the south from its earliest days it had a national reputation across between Pittsburgh and Dodge City a wide-open town where you could drink and gamble any time of day or night a place that you could always find a job it was an atmosphere of lawlessness of corruption of greed and the big companies were part of there you see tremendous wealth and tremendous poverty the wealth was private the poverty was public when the smoke of the factories cleared the buildings were left empty the problems exposed flaws that had not just been part of what this city used to be but in some ways exactly what it was meant to be one of the next events on the schedule was the all-america City parade which attracted one of the most enthusiastic crowds ever assembled in East st. Louis in 1960 it looked like any town USA this parade down State Street in East st. Louis Illinois was celebrating a great honor it had just been named an all-america City by Look magazine and the National Municipal League this was a city with neighborhoods pretty parks crowded schools factory jobs and unions a city with a strong Eastern European background and a growing african-american population it was like many big cities with urban renewal and housing projects and new expressways this is a city in transition the city changing its appearance and changing its attitudes to now being designated an all-american city was an honor for a community of this size this magnitude but what the community didn't know what the residents didn't know that this community had been pillaged if you will for all it could yield in many ways that its tax base had been ravaged and the revenues that a city needs to support itself were no longer flowing into this community what happened over the next 10 15 years would stun anger and frustrate these citizens as their hometown experienced to decline as incredible as its rise just a lifetime before in 1960 east st. Louis was at the end of an era this was a place that in many ways had served its purpose just as it had from its very earliest days it didn't really start out as a city but as a place that happened to be across from a city Captain James Pickett started a ferry operation here in the 1790s and it became an essential link for those heading west to st. Louis and beyond this side of the river was a flat muddy land known as the American bottoms there wasn't much here at first but there were efforts to establish towns with the names of Jacksonville Washington Illinois City East st. Louis and Illinois town some river boats started docking here but it was nothing compared to st. Louis on this side of the river there was only so far a town could go the east side flooded frequently it was swampy land so it really wasn't conducive to development the American bottoms which is that flat terrain of land that extends about seven to ten miles north south and three to five miles east and west I was constantly subject to flooding conditions so you didn't have much development there it said that in the great flood of 1844 the Mississippi River filled the American bottoms and that a steamboat actually tied up at the county seat of Belleville where the bluffs finally rise up st. Louis had the high ground and became the Great River City East st. Louis's day would come but it would not arrive by boat East st. Louis is a railroad town the first train came here in 1857 but more important than the fact that it came here was that it stopped here this was the end of the line until Saint Louis could manage to build a bridge the Illinois side of the river was as far as the trains would go the trip would be finished by ferry boat so it was on the east bank that everything got loaded unloaded and where hops and the topography once the biggest drawback was now an advantage because it's flat land you had a really nice level plane for laying rail tracks and rail tracks came through that American bottom from all directions so you had the whole place was crisscross with this complicated web of rail lines and that made it very attractive for industry because you could find a nice big parcel of land almost anywhere in the American bottom where you had rail facilities nearby within ten years of that first train pulling in ten more railroads would have their terminus here these were not homegrown frontier businesses rail lines with a long long reach of big corporations with international investors the owners and decision makers didn't live here they had never seen this place except on a map we are in the mid nineteenth century a place where railroads rule we are starting to see the effects of one side of the country being able to reach across by rail to the other side of the country we are becoming a network a networked economy so right from the outset I see not really local decision-making deciding the 14th of e st. Louis it was a national decisions the railroad companies and where would be the best place to to place them East Saint Louis is an incredible city because it is not built by st. Louis ins East st. Louis is built by the great industrial barons of the 19th century even the new bridge into st. Louis came under their control it was built by local st. Louis interests and opened in 1874 but when the bridge company couldn't make the payments the EADS bridge ended up in the hands of New York financier JP Morgan he made a deal with railroad tycoon Jay Gould and now there was a monopoly controlling the bridge rail lines the ferry operation and the tolls st. Louis leaders struggled for decades to loosen the grip of these out-of-town interests but the founder of East st. Louis embraced them from the start John Bowman was a German immigrant who had worked as Secretary to Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton he moved to the east side of the river in 1858 and got into the business of real estate and politics in Springfield he managed to get the state legislature to grant a new charter that brought together the competing towns near the ferry-landing Illinois town was what most people called it but Bowman wiped that name off the map and even the name East st. Louis is significant because that was what the railroads called this piece of land he gives it the industrial title rather than what the local landowners called it and so Bowman's interests are very very obvious it was John Bowman who in 1872 helped bring one of the first and most important industries to East st. Louis the stockyards investors many from Chicago and New York said they would build a nice hotel if the stockyards remained outside the city limits and city control the deal was made and the land for the stockyards was purchased from the mayor John Bowman created his st. Louis and profited from it but what he couldn't do is bring it under control there was turmoil at City Hall from 1870 to 1872 the city changed to mayor's seven times and differences were often settled in the streets East st. Louis had a reputation as being a very frontier kind of town I've heard it described as being worse than Dodge City a place where corruption was always rampant where there was political problems problems with crime and you know we hear about East st. Louis in the news and we think about that community as having these problems today but they had those problems right from the outset the issue that tore the town and too was flood protection Bowman felt East st. Louis couldn't grow until the problem was fixed downtown was low and flat the new bank had put its first floor above the flood line Bowman's plan was to raise the streets that high all over downtown his supporters were dubbed high-graders the opposition low graders saw it as a boondoggle that would benefit business interests and bankrupt the city it grew into a civil war with two competing governments two mayors two City Council's and two police forces ultimately the battle becomes violent not only to the police forces start exchanging fire but over time the battles become more and more frequent more and more violent until in 1885 John Bowman is assassinated he was gunned down outside his home no one was ever arrested for the assassination of the city's founder and first mayor if the crime was also meant to kill the hi great movement it had the opposite effect in 1887 sympathetic voters elected mayor Melbourne Stevens who carried out the street raising plan and nearly bankrupt the city you can still see the results of the high-graders victory today where there are empty Lots downtown well below the level of the streets and although John Bowman didn't live to see it East Saint Louis became an industrial boomtown it was a city that was raised up in the right place at the right time this is what fueled the boom East st. Louis not only had a river railroads and land for factories it also happened to be on the edge of southern Illinois coal country this is what turned the American Bottoms into one of America's great industrial centers this was an important period in history there was a really significant transformation going on in manufacturing sometimes known as the Second Industrial Revolution and what that means is it was a time when industry was relying more on capital than on labor as a source of input and by relying on coal and steam power they could build much larger factories achieve greater economies of scale and so for the first time you had these huge sprawling factories that were capital intensive and extremely dirty smokey not the sort of thing that people wanted to have in their backyard getting that coal into st. Louis factories meant paying a toll on every carload that crossed the river it was cheaper to burn Illinois coal in Illinois and that was just one of the advantages of putting a factory on the east side of the river in sight of st. Louis but out of its jurisdiction that corporations don't have to worry about the political clout of the big city but particularly they're concerned about any opposition to their environmental practices they can admit as much smoke as they want they can discharge as much waste into the waterways that they want and they don't have to worry about citizen opposition on the east side towns could be created without concerned citizens following the example of the town of National City the legal municipality that was home to the stockyards and meat packers and to very few actual residents up and down the american bottoms were the small towns with the big factories refineries smelters tanneries foundries adjacent to East st. Louis was National City and Monsanto Illinois later renamed so J home to several chemical and refining plants and Allerton short for aluminum ore town in 1903 the company that became Alcoa opened to the country's biggest aluminum processing plant at East st. Louis but not in he's sick Lewis East st. Louis City Hall did not control these industries but they could control City Hall and they often did through payoffs the government of East st. Louis is in one sense in the employ of industry instead of being founded on a social contract where people are in charge it's as if these cities are founded on business principles notions of profitability notions of utility notions of efficiency rather than on popular control and benefit of society but there were risks in setting yourself apart from your workers lives and well-being and other companies used a different approach in nearby Granite City a st. Louis company built its new Metal Works Factory and a whole town to go with it including homes that workers could buy it was called civic capitalism and it too was considered good business in an era of growing labor unrest people worry about the labor question because they're afraid that maybe we'll have a socialist party or some kind of radicalism they all you know have some kind of stake in suggesting that capitalism can have a social contract u.s. steel built one of the country's biggest company towns in 1906 in Indiana just outside Chicago they called it the city of the century in a 1913 film a Polish immigrant joins his brother to work in the safe modern American steel mill and live out the American dream in Gary Indiana he meets the local English teacher marries her and raises a family in one of the company built homes this was of course the company's version of the story and there were many unskilled workers who could not afford this kind of life many of them lived in poverty just outside the city limits in a neighborhood that was more mining camp than model City still places like Gary and Granite City could point to the company built playgrounds the model schools and in this film when the new immigrant heads for a tavern his brother shows him a better path in East Saint Louis one of Illinois largest cities at the time there was no YMCA people had tried to get one built but when they went to the local companies and plant managers they just couldn't raise the money [Music] other communities had large companies but they invested something in that community and they became company tans which have their own problems obviously but they took it one step further in East st. Louis and naturally stepped back out of the city boundary and and basically put nothing in and took everything out and decimated the environment with pollution etc and when they were done they walked away in the older bigger city of st. Louis the names of the industrial barons bush Mallinckrodt Danforth Queenie can be found on buildings and libraries and charitable foundations no such tradition grew in East st. Louis the money that was made there did not stay there it was not a place you moved to to get rich but it was known as a place you could get a job that they had heard halfway around the world [Music] I had heard that there were recruiters sent out to towns and villages who would say you know if you come to East st. Louis we guarantee you jobs in the meat packing industry we guarantee you housing you know we will pay you this much which is so much more than you've ever made before and you can come with your friends and relatives and neighbors you know and in fact we'll even ask your priest if he'd like to come over with you in the late 19th and early 20th centuries millions of people from Eastern Europe left their villages and farms and headed to the United States and it's factories and cities the chesnic a family was part of this migration leaving behind a hard life in a Polish farming village like many of the immigrants they came first to New York but they passed right through Ellis Island and kept on going their destination was East st. Louis Illinois and they knew there would be some kind of work when they got there yeah yeah railroads and they had meatpacking chose nikka grew up in East st. Louis in a neighborhood centered on st. $1 Church in school where he was taught in Polish and English it was like that all over town except that the language is changed from neighborhood to neighborhood there were the Croatians and the Ukrainians and the Slovak sand the poles and the Russians and the you know lethwei nians all the Eastern Europeans you can think of the Czechs you know the Bohemians they were very much in my opinion in little islands these little ethnic islands the census listed the faraway birth places in the myriad languages spoken by the new residents east st. Louis's population in 1910 had grown to 65,000 double what it had been ten years before this was a city with some 50 factories two dozen railroads there was work for men women and children these boys had their picture taken as part of a national study of child labor they worked in the auburn Esther glass factory in East st. Louis and we think of industrialization as the you know it we associate it with technological progress and to most people that means while you're attending machines but the need for just brute labor you know labor Irv's goes up by fifteen hundred percent in the period from 1890 to 1920 what these large industries need is unskilled labor it was hot hard and dangerous these factories were huge operations many of them processing industries the middle step between raw material and finished product very narrow profit margins and because you have a narrow profit margin you need to run your operation around the clock and large companies like aluminum or ran their companies around the clock had tremendous shifts thousands of workers 24 hours a day seven days a week keeping aluminum production going the meatpackers also work to protect the profit they could extract from every animal Gustavus Swift was famous for saying he used every part of the pig but the squeal Phillip Armour said that he made no money from the meat of a slaughtered animal that he sold at a loss the profit came in selling what was left over the hides to tanneries hooves and bones for gelatin fertilizer and gallons and gallons of lard on a single steer worth hundreds of dollars Armour said he made 59 cents profit when you have a narrow profit margin pretty soon all those other costs to do business become very important how much your taxes are how much your land acquisition costs are what your labor costs are heaven forbid if your workers want to organize into a union because that means more expense and that's coming out of that 59 cents that you're making on that animal anyone who talked about a union or complained about pay or working conditions could be easily replaced just as long as there was a surplus of workers a ready supply of replacements but things began to shift to the workers advantage because of global events when war broke out in Europe in 1914 it increased production in American factories even before the u.s. entered the war but it cut off the flow of immigrant workers so you know it's a great labor market for workers companies though they're looking for new surplus labor supply they want more workers than there are jobs so you have some recruitment from the rural areas they try to recruit whites but their best place to go for cheap unskilled labor is the south and black workers there this is the period of the great migration they want a job very badly so they are eager and there's a free railroad ride and it was it was as if the floodgates were were open and there was no no turning back like the Eastern Europeans before them African Americans now left home to find work and to start new lives in northern industrial cities and they heard that if you couldn't get a job in East st. Louis you couldn't get a job anywhere there had always been African Americans living in the American bottoms but their numbers were relatively small until now you could see it every day at the East st. Louis train station the new arrivals from the south coming in such numbers that they were becoming more visible in town in the factories and in politics these were loyal Lincoln Republicans anxious to vote and Republican Party leaders were anxious to get them registered it upsets the political balance in the the first couple of decades especially in that that second decade and and there is there's there's lots of talk especially in the teens about voter fraud the charges came from the Democrats and during Woodrow Wilson's 1916 reelection campaign the Justice Department investigated what was being called colonization an alleged conspiracy to import blacks to steal elections in northern cities one story unsupported by evidence but widely circulated was a plot to have blacks vote in East st. Louis than board a train to vote in Springfield and a third time in Chicago if you take the newspapers at face value you would say the public perception was oh yes there was colonization but when you start digging through the testimonies people knew it wasn't that at all black folks were trickling into the city World War one opened the floodgates they were coming anyway for jobs and the contemporaries knew that but people were being told they were here to steal elections labor leaders said they were here to steal jobs and the huge numbers of newcomers were straining the local housing and services racial tensions continued to grow across the river in st. Louis there were organizations and committees helping with the settlement of the new arrivals there was a tradition here of charitable organizations citizen committees dealing with issues of housing poverty and race relations but the efforts didn't reach into East st. Louis I think a city that wasn't corrupt would have had a huge problem in controlling that kind of growth and given the fact that this was a corrupt city that it was basically growth that was not managed now and it just happened willy-nilly and it was a an atmosphere of lawlessness of corruption greed and the big companies were part of that and yet many East st. Louis boosters saw only greatness ahead President Taft had come here in 1909 to dedicate the new federal courthouse the city was building an extensive flood control system and businessmen said they were laying the foundation of a big city that might rival st. Louis but shocking events and a congressional investigation would soon expose just how weak this community's foundation really was no one will ever know for sure how many people were killed in the East st. Louis race riot of 1917 some of the early reports were exaggerated the official death toll was 39 blacks and nine White's others accepted the higher number of a hundred almost all black it's not that the country was ever really at peace with itself in this era there were race riots and labor battles like these in other cities before and after but what happened in East st. Louis struck a national nerve the reports of Americans killing Americans came on the same front pages as the reports of American troops in Europe fighting to save democracy it was labor troubles at the aluminum or plant that set the tragic events in motion the company followed its usual practice of bringing in replacement workers to break the strikes and keep the plant in operation but now many of the replacements were Negros there were white replacements too but strike leaders made blacks the issue and the target it becomes so conflated with racial animosity - it's the way that you can organize people and organize a mob that's what they did in the spring of 1917 the National Guard was brought in to protect the factory and its workers but everybody knew this was a town on the verge of a race riot when violence flared up in May the guard was able to keep it under control but East st. Louis hadn't cooled off tensions built fueled by unsubstantiated Press reports of Negro crime waves and gun purchases and by rumors and inflammatory public speeches they wanted to drive the blacks out of easing Louis they wanted to make East st. Louis an all-white town the evening of Sunday July 1st a car drove through a Negro neighborhood firing shots as it drove by later when another car approached shots were fired from the crowd maybe some thought it was the same car but it wasn't police officers were in this one and two were killed when word of what happened to spread white mobs set out to attack blacks they beat shot lynched even burned to death fires were set in black neighborhoods and people were shot as they tried to escape the flames a family just up from Mississippi stepped right into the middle of it and we just did we got to 10th Street where we were standing we should see different people running in Highland color fiddling and they was getting down in the weed that they were hiding from and the guy were running shooting didn't nobody shootin you they see the smoke and hear the shot that was a scary time the daughter of former mayor Melbourne Stevens was told to stay indoors and she watched from her bedroom window you could hear cars racing by and people yelling and screaming and I could see all the fires burning where they set fire you know to the color did houses I was petrified [Applause] when it was over parts of East st. Louis were in ruins the death toll of blacks would never be accurately determined they searched for bodies but so many people couldn't be accounted for maybe they had crossed the bridge to st. Louis maybe their bodies were somewhere in the river the nation responded with speeches editorials and accusations some blamed labor the police city government industry for importing blacks some said whites had only acted to prevent a black uprising in the south many said the race riot exposed northern hypocrisy and showed what was really awaiting southern blacks in northern cities by the 19-teens it was the North's turn to decide on the Negro question and I see st. Louis as a harbinger of white supremacy northern style despite pressures from blacks and whites to condemn the riot President Wilson made no statement but Congress investigated the riot the crimes and the city of East st. Louis itself this wasn't a black eye this was a self-inflicted wound that would leave an ugly scar if it ever healed at all it sort of lets you know it's an indicator that a city is not just industry you know a city is people in a city is social you know in the broadest sense of of the word and and that that social fiber has to to be their problems are going to be their conflict is going to to be there and that's all a part of what our American democracy is is about but for for East st. Louis because it wasn't there it's the outcome the aftermath of of the ride was quite different than it was for a Springfield or a Chicago or Detroit from safely across the river st. Louis ins had watched the fires burned everybody knew the East Side's reputation for violence and vice and some knew at firsthand that had been going on since the Frontier Days even before there was much of a town the east side of the river had a reputation there was a sandy area that was covered with trees and what went on over there the duals and the cockfights was out of sight and across the state line it was called bloody Island many years later farmers would come to East st. Louis to sell their livestock they didn't know about bloody Island but they knew about whiskey shoot a road to the stockyards that was lined with taverns the east side was always a place that provided a sanctuary for all the offensive practices that st. Louis didn't want to deal with st. Louis wanted to get rid of so not only was it a place where you could pollute to your heart's desire it was a place where you could go get a drink on a Sunday and it's that's been a tradition on the east side it's been a zone of Vice it's been a zone of discard it's been a nuisance zone in 1896 a terrible tornado roared through st. Louis crossed the river and cut through East st. Louis hundreds were killed and there was widespread destruction the very next day the first establishment to rise from the wreckage on the East st. Louis riverfront was a saloon hammered together from the rubble east st. Louis was well known for its taverns and its factories but many of the factories were outside the city limits and didn't pay taxes the taverns did liquor stores made East st. Louis revenue work liquor licenses were very expensive they had to be renewed quarterly and they had to be paid a year or more in advance about half of the city's budget came from saloon licenses in 1917 this was a resilient part of the economy after the big flood of 1903 many residents moved out of the hardest-hit area just outside downtown and new businesses moved in when the water went down this would become known as the valley one of the Midwest's most famous red-light districts oh yeah you could went across the river on the bridge you know and looked at and the women would all be lined up on the porch well they were just [ __ ] houses that's all that work there was little fear of police crackdown plenty of cops and politicians and well-connected landlords were making money on all of this and prohibition would make it even more profitable it wasn't until World War two that there was a serious effort to clean up the valley nearby Scott field had one of the highest rates of venereal disease of any base in the country and the army threatened to make East st. Louis completely off-limits to it's Airmen if something wasn't done but enforcement was always a matter of degree in East st. Louis and the valley disappeared in name only I grew up and that turreted shining shoes running errands for the Vice girls all I know is there was a lot of ice going on down there there was a lot of nightclubs down there and there was a lot of hustle and bustle down there at that time st. Louis had nightlife but it also had closing times so patrons and musicians would head to the east side where the drinks were served and the music played all day and all night what made East st. Louis notorious would also make it famous in music history there was live jazz and blues at countless clubs and taverns and it was here at the Cosmopolitan Club on New Year's Eve of 1952 that Chuck Berry filled in for a sick member of the Sir John Trio making this one of the legitimate birth places of rock and roll the band was led by piano player Johnny Johnson he had come to East st. Louis after the war looking for work but not as a musician and after I really got into music that's when I really began to appreciate he singles as a music time I didn't really go there with the intention of making a name for myself as a musician I went there to work you know a nine-to-five thing before he started making rock and roll records and going on tour and sometimes even after Johnny Johnson was like thousands of others hard at work in the East Side factories making bricks glass steel chemicals at one job at the Swift meatpacking plant his musical career nearly came to an end one day I stuck the knife and the sheep's neck and knife hit a bone and ricocheted off the bone right through my thumb and left that even though I was cut until when I got to the end where I would turn the Sheep a loose I saw this thing gang and look my phone all this is right meetup on it was did so quickly didn't have time to bleed before I've seen it and then naturally rush me over the bar at hospital and put me to sleep and so about your home the meat packing houses employed thousands of people newcomers were given the worst jobs carcass loggers and gut washers people spent their whole working lives here hard physical work and conditions that were too hot too cold and both at the same time I don't work yeah he might be sweaty but she was cold an Illinois guidebook called East st. Louis in 1939 lusty smoky and virile life in these factory towns was lived with a constant backdrop of smoke and grit from the industrial stacks and the locomotives and with the sounds of Steel on Rails and the whistles of trains and factories it didn't have the big-city sophistication of st. Louis Missouri for the charm of the farm towns or county seats of southern Illinois this was the American bottles and when the heavy rains came the water flowed down from the bluffs and collected in the streets it was said that's how Venice Illinois had gotten its name and there were pockets here of extreme poverty down by the river was car island described by the guidebook as a squatter settlement with a thousand Negroes living in huts built from scraps that's how the Lewis family lived during the Depression but you rent the ground for 50 cents a month and you take any kind of wood you could get car boxes anything and be up a room on it and see we had a room there was no door the wonders with living there back then were wrong the housing conditions were nasty segregation was not the law in Illinois but it was the practice in this part of the state in schools and in factories and in the neighborhoods of East st. Louis and in Brooklyn the oldest all-black town in Illinois despite the 1917 race riot blacks had kept coming to East Egg Louis to find work the area's population increased in the middle part of the century but since 1930 on it was almost entirely due to the growing black population and yet in the 1940s East st. Louis was still more than 80 percent white this was still a city of tight knit white ethnic communities still a city of old-world accents foods and customs but in other ways especially after the war younger East st. Louis ins would grow up in a very different place than their parents and grandparents had come to things were as good as they had ever been maybe as good as they would ever be and I don't think that period should be underestimated at all it's you know that period from the 1930s to the 1950s is one in which people belen comes on a yearly basis for the first time the factories were still going and filled with workers and now federal laws recognized their right to organize unions and negotiate contracts and this tough factory town now became a tough union town to the point that by 1950 80 percent of workers were organized in st. Louis it's probably the highest rate in the United States and it might actually be one of the highest rates in the world many East st. Louis natives would look back on these days nostalgically and wonder what happened but it was already happening East st. Louis was a place of aging factories and high labor costs and companies were already looking for better places to do business the biggest factories that had long defined East st. Louis aluminum the stockyards meatpacking foundries they were cutting back in the 50s and shutting down and moving out in the 60s and 70s it would happen in a lot of the industrial cities in what would come to be called America's Rust Belt but any say Louis it's wild abandon it's 50% between 1950 and 1970 50% of industrial jobs leave the city it's an incredible statistic at the same time East st. Louis would have to deal with the old issue of race relations blacks had kept coming to the city even though the jobs were starting to leave the population was spilling over the old boundaries and an increasingly aggressive civil rights movement was challenging the old rules and restrictions in the late 50s James go spend a couple of years in the Army and he noticed the change when he came back home when I came back in 1959 things were beginning to change as far as location for blacks they were coming out of rush City they were coming out of Franklin bottom area where the Casino Queen said that now there was a little community down there they were coming from fireworks station I thought it was really something to go to the majestic theater because that was not allowed when I went into the military his family had been here since the depression his wife's family had come up from Mississippi before the first world war about the same time the chesnic a family had arrived from Poland some sixty years later their descendants became next-door neighbors almost overnight was the demise of those ethnic communities my father who couldn't really be accused of being liberal went around the neighborhood and said you know I don't really see why we should move until at least we see these people like maybe they're actually good neighbors I was a bit afraid to move into this neighborhood I wasn't I wasn't I wasn't scared because my parents and my grandparents they were always proud people and they had always taught us that you're not less than anybody and you have the right to be anywhere that you can afford from some there was open hostility towards the new Negro neighbors others gave them the silent treatment and the white neighbors got together to talk about what they should do and the reason I knew that I wasn't invited to the meetings the John would tell me I mean about the meters and sometime he would tell me what they were planning and what they didn't want and what they were going to do and and we became very good friends and I remember the day that he left here he was the last Caucasian to leave the street East st. Louis had long been divided between black and white in its neighborhoods and schools and in its two new swimming pools but it would soon be on its way to becoming an all-black City Alvin fields who served five terms as mayor of East st. Louis decided not to run for re-election in 1971 and that year the race to replace him was between two black candidates but in many ways it would still be politics east st. louis-style fields had brought blacks into the political machine and now it would be theirs I believe there was more an aspiration to be in the position and there was a concomitant assumption that things would just continue to work the way they always have worked and it was not until those seats were occupied that this new leadership began to realize they were ruling over very little East st. Louis in the 1970s was declining but not into obscurity in 1979 voters elected carl officer at age 27 the youngest mayor in the country leading one of the most depressed cities in the country newspapers and magazines and network television once again made east st. Louis a national story but in many ways it was an old story that raised the same baffling questions why doesn't somebody do something about this and what sort of ironic is that every mayor in East st. Louis history was a reformer every mayor has come in saying I'm going to make this city better than the mayor before me there was one fellow who ran mayor Chamberlain in 1915 who said let's make east st. Louis a little more like home and a little less like hell this was one of the country's major industrial and rail centers built by money fuel raw materials technology hard work and yet with all that it had even in 1920 the city of East st. Louis Illinois was one of the poorest cities in the United States and it continued to grow by 1960 the year it was named an all-america City the population was 80,000 city planners said it might grow to a hundred thousand in the next 20 years but instead it would fall until less than half the population remained it would happen across the river in st. Louis and in other big industrial cities but because of its separation and isolation the coming urban problems would turn East st. Louis into an inner city with no how - city crime poverty corruption pollution none of that was new it's just that East st. Louis had always gotten by because of the jobs it was a place propped up by industries that had as it turned out just been passing through aluminum or it was a period of 50 years that's the the life of that investment this is a perfect example of something that's continuing to the present and is problematic for the whole world the mobility of global capital but the permanence of communities the reasons industry came here were the reasons they left new sources of fuel new technology new sources of cheaper labor in other parts of the country and the world where unions hadn't taken hold and transportation interstate highways and long-haul trucking freed industry from the railroads and East st. Louis the great rail terminus became just another interchange it was certainly a boomtown and just as boon tans rise they fall on East st. Louis fell and within the global economy it has found no niche it hasn't found anything to replace at industrialization Outsiders are struck by the decay in the abandonment but it's been that way now for a generation and those who live here tend to see other things the remnants of the old healthy neighborhoods hanging on and fixing up even here and there and all new neighborhood and in a town of boarded up storefronts a new place to go shopping and in a town of empty factories a new industry an old industry really that is now legal and providing jobs paying into the city treasury and attracting visitors drops perhaps in a very large bucket but drops nonetheless and East st. Louis has always been a place filled with hope for the future even while it is burdened by its past [Music] made in USA is made possible by a grant from the estate of Nancy George which reminds you to include public television in your will or trust additional funding is provided by the Philip Cowan group and the generous support of the members of ke TC you

Channel: Nine PBS

Views: 198,017

Keywords: East St. Louis, East STL, Illinois, stl, industry

Id: 2JdEec2ZEfA

Length: 56min 30sec (3390 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020