An evocative and powerful portrait of America in transition, The End of
the Line tells the story of what the 1988 closing of the Chrysler
assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, meant to the people who lived in
that company town. Since the early days of the twentieth century,
Kenosha had forged its identity and politics around the interests of the
auto industry. When nearly six thousand workers lost their jobs in the
shutdown, the community faced not only a serious economic crisis but
also a profound moral one. In this innovative study, Dudley describes
the painful, often confusing process of change that residents of
Kenosha, like the increasing number of Americans who are caught in the
crossfire of deindustrialization, were forced to undergo. Through
interviews with displaced autoworkers and Kenosha's community leaders,
high-school counselors, and a rising class of upwardly mobile
professionals, Dudley dramatizes the lessons Kenoshans drew from the
plant shutdown. When economic forces intrude on our lives, the resulting
changes in earning power, status, and access to opportunity affect our
sense of who we are, what we are worth, the nature of the world we live
in, and in particular, what it takes to succeed. Dudley examines how
ideas about self-worth - especially those based on market ideologies of
competition and the Darwinian notion that only the fittest survive -
become the subject of intense cultural conflict. Dudley describes a
community in conflict with itself: while Kenosha's autoworkers struggle
to regain an economic foothold and make sense of their suddenly devalued
place in society, white-collar workers, professionals, and a new wave of
politicians see themselves at thevanguard of a new moral order that
redefines community as a "culture of mind" instead of the traditional
"culture of hands" long associated with the work of the assembly line.
This honest, moving portrait of one town's radical shift from a
manufacturing to a postindustrial economy will
