Richard C. Longworth is a former Tribune foreign correspondent, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the new book, "Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism" (Bloomsbury). I grew up in a small town in central Iowa, a county seat called Boone, a safe and secure place, confident in its isolation. This was lonesome-whistle territory, where passing trains announced another world out there. In time, some of us got on those trains to seek that world. We knew it wasn't going to come to us. When a British newspaper proclaimed it the typical American small town and sent a reporter to write about it, he interviewed one local elder who said: "We are pretty well self-sufficient. We don't need the world." Even then, this was a blinkered attitude; after all, somebody out there bought our corn and hogs. But it was true that distant events--in Europe, China, Latin America--did not dictate our daily lives. Businesses were locally owned. Jobs lasted for life. Everybody looked like everybody else, and immigration amounted to a few Greek restaurant owners. If a store closed, it was because the owner retired, not because a Wal-Mart opened out on the highway. For the most part, this stability and self-sufficiency stretched across the vast middle of America, the heartland region called the Midwest. Things always were more complicated in the great cities, like Chicago and Detroit, but even they pumped out their steel and cars with no thought that events thousands of miles away, across oceans, could change their lives. By the 1970s, the Rust Belt era and the rural debt crisis shattered this smug certainty. But few saw these as global events. When industries left the Midwest, they went to the Sun Belt, seldom to Mexico, certainly not to China. When farms failed, it was because they took on too much debt, not because Brazil started to grow soybeans. Then, about a decade ago, globalization swept in and changed the Midwest landscape forever. Traditional family farms vanished. Steel mills closed and auto factories shrunk. "Downsizing" and "outsourcing" entered our vocabularies and frightened our workforce. Some big cities, like Chicago, coped. Others, like Detroit, rotted. Small industrial cities fought to stay alive; most are failing. "Rural" became a synonym for "poor."
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