James A. Rhodes, Ohio Colossus by Tom Diemer & Lee Leonard & Richard G. Zimmerman

Author:Tom Diemer & Lee Leonard & Richard G. Zimmerman [Diemer, Tom & Leonard, Lee & Zimmerman, Richard G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Korean War, Military, Biography & Autobiography, History, Political
ISBN: 9781606352151
Google: uZWvngEACAAJ
Goodreads: 20673872
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2014-01-15T10:25:13+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Recession!

HELEN RHODES HAD NO DOUBTS about her hyperactive husband’s energy level or his resolve. In an impromptu exchange with reporters after Rhodes returned from China, she said he “can’t sit still.” He won’t retire after his term as governor ends in 1982, she said. “He has his fingers in several things.”1

Rhodes, in fact, did not stand by and wait for a free-market miracle as the economy worsened; he was engaged. But what he didn’t have his fingers in was the debate over the “new economy,” fundamental shifts in the job market that would take hold in the last two decades of the twentieth century. At universities and think tanks, economists were talking about structural changes they believed would alter Ohio’s industrial base and point toward the emerging communications, service and health care sectors, alternative energy, and smaller, specialized manufacturing plants.

“That lexicon was foreign to his experience,” said Bill Wilkins, who by 1980 was heading the Department of Administrative Services for Rhodes.2 Manufacturing jobs peaked nationally at 19.6 million in 1979, but heavily unionized states like Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois were already being written off as the Rust Belt.3 Employers looked to cheaper labor and warmer climes in Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas—the Sunbelt. With its northern cities shrinking, Ohio was losing population, jobs, and also clout on Capitol Hill. Its congressional delegation slipped from twenty-one to nineteen after the 1980 census showed only modest growth in the state.4

“After the Carter economy and when things got better for Ohio economically, I don’t think the governor appreciated that there was an evolution from smokestacks to high tech—and I don’t think many people did,” said Rhodes’s executive assistant Robert Howarth. “I don’t think we were talking about high tech. However, he did know that the key to Ohio’s economic future and success was the work force and the young people being trained.”5 Howarth’s predecessor, Tom Moyer, had a similar take. “He certainly was not a Third Frontier person in the last term. For him, big manufacturing, that is where his heart was. He understood it. He thought, too, it created so many jobs.”6

Nor was Rhodes a booster of a service economy. “We can’t all sit around and cut each other’s hair,” he was fond of saying when the topic came up. Rhodes’s critics believed his best years were behind him “In his last two terms, his administration didn’t have a handle on what was going on,” said State Representative Robert Netzley, a western Ohio Republican to the political right of Rhodes. “Things just seemed to run out of control.”7 Senate Leader Ocasek said Rhodes clung to a philosophy, which I have been slower to adopt: “what’s good for industry is good for Ohio.”8

Inflation roared across the country in February 1980 at an 18.2 percent compounded annual rate.9 In April, the United States’ industrial production dropped by nearly 2 percent—the steepest slide since early 1975. General Motors reacted to slumping sales by furloughing more than four hundred at Cleveland area factories; Ford Motor

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