Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Paper Girl by Beth Macy is a good book subtitled A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macys grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating in 1982 from Urbana High School. There was a healthy economy, thriving schools, and middle class, that Macys, one of the poorer kids in her class, could aspire to. 

A Pell Grant, spearheaded by Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, enabled Macys to attend college. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1986, the tail end of the time a Pell Grant would cover tuition, housing, and books for a poor kid. Now the average Pell grant pays less than 30% of a public university education, an amount that could well have shut out Macys, who later was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, from college. The gutting of Pell Grants began under Ronald Reagan and continued under Bill Clinton. Reagan’s Secretary of Education derided the notion of education helping people recover from poverty, and Reagan compared Pell recipients to welfare moms. Clinton then cratered financial aid for poor kids, at the same time he brought the U.S. into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, predicting that offshoring would be a win-win for American workers. NAFTA took a million jobs, and subsequent free trade agreements and globalization another four million jobs. 

Free trade, and anger over it, was cited in presidential election exit polls as a reason for Trump flipping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan red in 2016. Macys writes that Democrats should have embraced unionism, a la Bernie Sanders, but instead, rural communities have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, leaving small town America available for the Republican Party to feed on. Local news, particularly in rural America, has been decimated, so people get their information from Facebook posts and press releases. This leads to a split of society, where people aren’t given real information and can easily descend into tribalism. Quoted is the philosopher Richard Rorty who in 1998 predicted that globalization and inequality would lead to class resentment, and someone would tap into it and be elected as a strongman, proclaiming that he’ll make the elites pay. Trump in 2024 won 91% of the counties lacking a professional news source.

Macys with her book went back to Urbana to write on what had become of the town. She notes that just 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 16% in Urbana. The mayor, Bill Bean, who took over his dad’s successful insurance business that started in 1866, says college is overrated and the town’s 16% college graduation rate doesn’t bother him. Also noted is how someone who ran against Bean and lost now runs a youth center that Urbana’s establishment blocked from receiving a $2M grant from the state. 

When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. However, the Urbana that Macys returned to featured schools with large numbers of parents yelling at teachers, and take their kids out, professing to homeschool them, but just not wanting to be responsible for their truancy when kids just weren’t showing up for school. It’s noted that homeschooling is now the fastest growing form of education in the country, with the gutting of public schools creating separate educational systems. When people lose faith in their schools, and what they can do for their kids, it's a crisis. If kids don’t see a way out, and low-income kids aren’t exposed to normal and good while at school, it’s too easy for them to become stuck. 

Factories shut down, union jobs go away, leaving low paying jobs, and when there are good jobs, it can be hard for employers to be get good workers. Enough people couldn’t be found for skilled manufacturing jobs that the Biden Administration was subsidizing. The few who go away to college don’t return, so there’s no models for kids, leaving Urbana what Macys describes as a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. She tells the story of recent Urbana High graduate Silas James and covers how something as basic as reliable transportation to a job or school can be so vital to someone's efforts. Macys also writes about how her older sister denied sexual abuse allegations by her daughter Liza, against her stepdad. It’s heartbreaking reading and while Paper Girl is a good book, it’s also a tough one.

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren is a solid novel, one with heart, that features as its lead one of the secondary characters from Huckleberry Finn. It was interesting reading in the postscript of the work that Jahren put into getting characters and historical details right, creating a fictional work grounded in facts.

The book is an adventure tale, starting with fourteen-year-old Mary Jane in 1846 being sent 400 miles down the Mississippi River by her mother Ida to go help her aunt Evelyn, who is caring for her injured husband George and raising daughters Susan and Joanna. She took the steamboat Minnesota Belle down the Mississippi, and then went about the Galenian, helmed by Mrs. Captain, who would become Mary Jane's good friend. The Galenian was coal-powered, with the boiler known as Robert Fulton, and Mary Jane worked while aboard, helping Mrs. Captain run the ship. She was then met by the Schmidt family, Mormons who took Mary Jane to her aunt, uncle, and cousins, where she discovered that her extended family had little, but she could help. George had suffered a head injury and wasn't able to work, and Evelyn was caring for he and the two girls, and the Schmidts giving provisions every Sunday. 

Mary Jane was a worker and tirelessly helped the family. Things were going well, with Uncle George improving, until he had a seizure, developing paralysis, then Evelyn got sick. Mary Jane had been exposed to the illness, but quickly recovered, and the Schmidt family took in Susan and Joanna so that they wouldn't catch it while Mary Jane tried to nurse Aunt Evelyn back to health. It turned out to be unsuccessful and Evelyn died, with George dying shortly after. Mary Jane decided to be responsible for her cousins and planned to take them back to her family, but a judge decided that they, including Mary Jane who said that she their sister, should go live with a relative of their father, Peter Wilks of Greenville, MS. 

For the trip to Greenville, the girls wound up back on the Galenian, with Mrs. Captain. Also onboard the ship was a boy not yet ten-years-old, Rooster, who Mrs. Captain had befriended and was working in the ship. Mrs. Captain noted that he "didn't have a good start," but was doing a great job working and living on the ship as first mate. Mrs. Captain would speak of others by saying "it doesn't cost anything to be kind" and her plan was to give the Galenian to Rooster in a few years when she retires. Peter Wilks, Susan and Joanna's uncle, was not a good man. The three girls befriended a dog, that they named Cherry, who never left their side. Wilks fell ill and died and into the picture came two people who pretended to be his brothers, and with them was a young man who Mary Jane became taken with. Peter Wilks' actual brothers showed up, were good men, and Susan and Joanna decided to go back to London with them. Once more the girls spent time on the Galenian with Mrs. Captain and Rooster, and Mary Jane went and found the young man, who turned out to be Huck Finn.