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This chapter frames the history of punk rock within the broader historical context of Peoria, Illinois, a conservative, mid-sized city in the American Midwest. The chapter touches on the city’s history as the whiskey capital of the world, a staple of the American vaudeville circuit, the world headquarters of Caterpillar, Inc., and a popular American test market. Before punk rock bands such as Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard passed through the city, its complicated history already included ties to figures as varied as Richard Pryor, Ronald Reagan, Charles Manson, and George Wallace.

This chapter focuses on trade and investment ties between Mongolia and the United States as Mongolia itself moves increasingly from development to commercial relationships. During the early 1990s, American businessmen were already active in Urga as Ulaanbaatar was then known, promoting trade ties, developing transportation links and speculating about potential mineral wealth. In more recent years, trade ties have expanded significantly as US companies such as Caterpillar, Boeing and General Electric increase their exports to Mongolia. While US investment in mining still lags behind, economic growth fuelled by Mongolia's mineral wealth continues to offer economic opportunity while also helping to strengthen political ties between the two countries.

The economic development championed by the Chinese government’s “Help Tibet” campaign results in an influx of Han Chinese to Tibet. The Chinese take jobs from the Tibetans, exploit Tibet’s mineral riches and trample on Tibetan culture. Not only are Tibetans sidelined in their homeland but they are regarded with suspicions by Chinese officials. Some Tibetans are driven to the lowliest of livelihoods, such as prostitution. Many Tibetan women see marrying Chinese men as the way out.

In April 1974, Admiral was absorbed into Rockwell International’s growing empire. The Vietnam War contractor was, according to the New York Times, on a “debt-financed acquisition binge that lasted almost a decade” as it spread its reach into aircraft, defense, aerospace, electronics, and appliances. Admiral, meanwhile, was still churning out televisions, radios, and home appliances at factories across the Midwest. Productive as it was, the little company couldn’t afford the massive capital outlays required to modernize, market, and survive in the increasingly brutal electronics and appliance businesses. Accustomed to the massive revenues and fat profits of big government contracts, Rockwell International trimmed employment at the plant, investing $25 million to automate the chest-freezer line. In 1975 Rockwell added a 60,000-square-foot microwave oven facility, and in 1978 it spent $12 million to retool the top-mount refrigerator line and erect the “Blue Goose,” a massive machine the length of a football field that spat out finished metal cabinets. In earlier times, investment meant more jobs. Under Rockwell’s rigorous ethic of scientific management, it usually meant fewer. Admiral accounted for about an eighth of Rockwell’s revenues. “We weren’t even peanuts to Rockwell,” Michael Patrick said. It was a new era for Appliance City. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Dave Bevard was let out of work an hour and a half early. Production workers were instructed to gather in the vast parking lot across the street from the factory. Under a circus tent, a Rockwell representative and the Admiral plant manager told workers about the importance of the B-1 bomber to the nation’s defense, to Rockwell’s future, and, consequently, to Galesburg jobs. By this time Rockwell had production of the B-1 in over forty states, making itself the model practitioner of militaryindustrial growth. The plan was to use its nonmilitary production facilities in a lobbying campaign to maintain one of the most lucrative military contracts in history—around $10 billion at the time. Workers signed premade postcards for their congressman and went home early that day.

Two Weeks After BusinessWeek lauded Maytag’s remarkable success, the company broke clean from a century-old tradition. On August 12, 1999, Lloyd Ward replaced Leonard Hadley by a vote of the board of directors. Ward was the first executive never to have worked for Maytag. He had not been raised in the idiosyncratic Maytag culture. He was not even an appliance guy. Hadley had been grooming Ward for the CEO’s position since Ward came to the company as president of the home appliance division in 1996. Two internal candidates had been groomed and judged unfit for the CEO’s job; Ward was their last hope. Still, the board’s choice shocked many. Ward was anything but short on confidence though. He had wrestled a childhood of poverty and a career touched often by racism and had won. He had captained the Michigan State basketball team. He had earned a black belt in karate. He was now a star of business on the rise. When Ward became only the second African American to become a CEO at a Fortune 500 company, Black Enterprise declared it a “watershed moment.” It was easy to see why Hadley liked Ward: he brought Maytag a magnetic personality, inspirational leadership, and some badly needed diversity. Hadley said he “drooled” when he saw Ward’s resume and relished bringing in this bold, extroverted marketing man. Even before he became CEO, Ward began to revamp Maytag’s old-fashioned culture with an “unapologetically macho” leadership style. He began to shift Maytag’s focus to brand management, lower-end products, and sophisticated consumer research. Ward also brought in people from outside the appliance industry, from P&G and PepsiCo mainly. Ward’s ascendance won praise, including a fawning cover story in BusinessWeek. Joe Krejci, a Galesburg logistics manager who reported directly to Newton, was taken by Ward’s irresistible charm. Ward, still a diehard Michigan State Spartan, once came into Krejci’s office and stomped on his University of Michigan doormat with a theatrical smile. They then “shot the shit” about Big Ten football and basketball.

It Was a cold evening in early December 2006, and Tracy Warner had just returned home from Willits Primary School. Ryan had just sung in the “Winter Wonderland” musical there. Christmas lights dotted F Street, adding some warmth to her modest block in the heart of Monmouth, Illinois. She looked like a new woman, and, judging by her smile, she knew it. The jeans and T-shirt—the uniform of the anxious, soon-to-be-unemployed line worker and picketer of a couple years earlier—had been replaced by a red V-neck sweater, silk blouse, and an aura of confidence. She was wrapping up four fall semester classes and a journalism internship at the school’s news­paper, the Western Courier. She had done this while raising Ryan and frantically looking for a job. She was set to graduate on the following Saturday from Western Illinois University. The dream Warner had dreamt a thousand times while piecing together refrigerator doors on the Maytag line for over fifteen years was coming true. “Look at this,” she said, handing me an essay. “It’s a paper on Rawls’ theory of justice. He said that we have to stand behind a veil of ignorance to make fair decisions.” Her reference fit the moment. John Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice poses a hypothetical world in which all societal roles are shuffled behind a metaphorical “veil of ignorance.” Behind this veil, one does not know to what role he or she will be assigned in the new social order. It is only from there, Rawls argues, can one truly judge the fairness of various social roles and relations. The CEO, for instance, would have to experience the lives of workers he put out of work. Warner still saw Ralph Hake as a great villain—and it was not just because of the factory closing and the gutting of her working life as well as the working lives of her friends and co-workers. Warner had embraced the changes as best she could, and she and Ryan would find a way to survive.

It was Late on a sunny, but bitterly cold mid-February afternoon. Michael Patrick, red-eared from the chill, cast a long shadow across the rough concrete that used to be the Appliance City factory floor. A few months earlier, two-thirds of the expansive ruin had been razed. It was now an extended chinhigh pile of crumbled bricks, broken cinderblocks, mangled rebar, and cornyellow insulation chunks. Patrick, dressed in a corduroy jacket, wool trousers, and a brown wool fedora, remarked that there was little now to stop the bitter Arctic winds that swept through the enormous demolition site. One could see clear through to the Henry C. Hill Correctional Center across the tracks and farther north on Illinois Route 41. The razed portion of the former factory was big enough to fit twenty football fields, side by side. The newest part of the factory was still standing, but vacant. The California-based investment company that owned the property hoped that clearing the “old, antiquated industrial real estate” would make the remaining property more attractive to potential buyers. “When you’re here,” Patrick said, “you think about the people. It was the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers that made this place run. It was ours, you know? We had different owners come and go but we made it run.” He pushed his hands deep into his jacket pockets and shrugged. It was early 2013, and Patrick could mark fifty-four years since he and Bob Dennison, Doug’s father, started packing insulation at Admiral’s Midwest Manufacturing plant on January 26, 1959. Patrick lived alone in a modest brick house on South Pleasant Avenue, just across the BNSF tracks, less than a mile away. The 72-year-old retiree hibernated in the winter, but managed to make each of his granddaughter’s sixth-grade basketball games. When the weather warmed, Patrick took his late model minivan to antique shows, estate sales, and collectors’ conventions. He collected license plates and license plate toppers, die-cast cars, and other trinkets. Earlier that day, over lunch at the Landmark Cafe, we had discussed the wage pressures, retiree obligations, and foreign competition that faced Maytag in the early 2000s.