The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (54 page)

To escape traffic and heat, they waited most of the day to leave: Danny, Brent, and
one cat in the rental truck, Dennis, Ronale, Danielle, and the other three cats in
the Cavalier. By sunset the Hartzells had left Tampa behind.

*   *   *

They lasted a little over a month in Georgia.

Danny’s friend had a new girlfriend, and she didn’t want the Hartzells around. He
was a surly host, demanding reimbursement for movie tickets, dropping broad hints
that they should move out as fast as possible, treating them as inferiors, even making
fun of Ronale’s weight, which greatly offended Danny. One day, the kids went for a
walk in the woods and Brent came back with ticks. The next day, Dennis disturbed a
hornet’s nest in the yard and was stung half a dozen times. They moved into the first
trailer they could find, off a busy highway. The A/C didn’t work, but the kids were
afraid of the stinging velvet ants, so they stayed inside the stifling trailer day
and night. The good news was that Danny found a welding job, working on tractor trailers
with a crew of Mexicans for $12.50 an hour, but on his first day he caught a falling
piece of steel and aggravated an old back injury. The next day he could hardly get
out of bed. After years of unemployment and retail he wasn’t in shape for heavy work.
Brent was doing fine—he could be anywhere as long as he had his family and video games—but
Danielle missed her friends, and her parents belatedly realized that the regular eight-hour
trips back to the hospital in Tampa for adjustments to her prosthesis were going to
be arduous and expensive. In rural Georgia every drive was long—Dennis’s new Wal-Mart
was miles from the trailer, the milk began to spoil before Ronale could get it back
from the store, and they were eating up all their money in gas. Worst of all was the
isolation. They were no longer speaking to Danny’s friend. In Tampa at least they
had the doctors, the support group. Here they had no one.

By early August they were done. Returning to Tampa was less a decision than a collapse.
A benefactor from the hospital found them a trailer park near Brandon called River
Run. Ronale looked at the pictures online and put down a two-week deposit of four
hundred dollars. They rented another truck and left Georgia just before midnight on
a Friday. When they reached River Run the next morning and saw the holes in their
trailer’s walls, the jalousie windows that didn’t open, the door without a lock, the
lack of any appliances, they wanted to fall on their knees and cry. There was no way
the children could live there. They drove into Tampa and dropped Dennis off at Wal-Mart
to plead for his old $7.60-an-hour job back. Then they started looking for a motel.
Some homing instinct led the Hartzells back to the area around MacDill, where they
took a forty-five-dollar-a-night room at the Crosstown Inn off South Dale Mabry Highway,
a few blocks north of their old apartment. There was a toaster oven, and they ate
toasted hot dogs one night, little pizzas made out of buns, tomato sauce, and sliced
cheese the next. All their stuff was in the rental truck, already a day late on the
return, which meant half the deposit. They’d lost the deposit on the trailer in River
Run. They had enough money for about a week at the motel. After that, there was a
woman they knew from the hospital who might be able to take in Brent and Danielle
while Danny, Ronale, and Dennis slept in the car.

Danny was at the end of his rope. He tried to put on a brave face, but he kept berating
himself—he hadn’t thought the whole thing through, all the consequences, and now the
simplest decision left him paralyzed. One day, Danny and his daughter were sitting
in their car in the Wal-Mart parking lot getting ready to go in and buy sandwich meats,
bread, and potato salad for dinner at the motel, and Danielle started crying. She
was afraid that if they became homeless again the cats would die. Danny always tried
to be a strong father in front of his kids, but as he put his arms around Danielle
he couldn’t keep from crying with her.

In the middle of the crisis, Danny experienced a painful clarity. He knew two things:
everything had to be about Danielle’s health, and everything depended on his finding
a job. Shaking off a numbness that had settled over him, he began driving all over
Tampa, dropping off applications everywhere that was hiring, fast food or anything,
it didn’t matter. After Dennis’s supervisor at Wal-Mart put in a good word for Danny,
he was hired to unload and stock produce for eight dollars an hour. With his and Dennis’s
jobs at Wal-Mart, he was able to secure a $745-a-month apartment in public housing
on South Lois Avenue. It had one more bedroom than their old place on Dale Mabry,
which was only a mile away, bringing them full circle, as if God had meant for them
to forget about going somewhere else to start over, and instead try to make things
work here where they had their feet planted.

PRAIRIE POPULIST: ELIZABETH WARREN

She had two stories to tell. One was about herself, the other was about America.

Elizabeth Herring was a good girl from Oklahoma. Her folks were Dust Bowl survivors
who never headed out to the coast, conservative Methodists clinging to respectability.
They had three much older sons. By the time Elizabeth arrived in 1949, a business
partner had run off with the money that her father had saved up for a car dealership.
Mr. Herring had to work as a janitor in an Oklahoma City apartment building to pay
his debts and feed his family.

The parents used good English and taught the children not to say
ain’t
, and Liz made them proud with her grades. Despite her father’s job, she was so convinced
the family was securely middle class that it shocked her to learn that her mother
hadn’t been married in a nice wedding dress.

When Liz was twelve, her father had a heart attack. He was demoted at work, and between
that and the medical bills, the Herrings couldn’t make payments on their air-conditioned
bronze Oldsmobile and lost it. In order to hold on to the house, which they had bought
in Oklahoma City’s best school district, Mrs. Herring had to take a job answering
phones in the mail order department of Sears. On the first day of work, Liz watched
as her mother, crying, squeezed herself into an old girdle and black dress.

“Is this dress too tight?” her mother asked.

Liz lied that she looked great.

Her mother railed at having to go back to work, hammered on her husband for failing
the family. He withdrew into his humiliation. Liz stayed out of the way—throughout
her life she had a habit of refusing to look a debacle in the face—and kept up appearances.
She babysat and waitressed, sewed her own clothes, had her father drop her off a block
away from Northwest Classen High School so that her classmates wouldn’t notice the
condition of their old off-white Studebaker. She joined the Pep Club and won the Betty
Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award.

It was the midsixties, but none of the upheavals reached the Herrings. Oklahoma City
was still segregated. Liz’s brother Don was fighting in Vietnam and of course they
supported him and the war. Liz recited the daily prayer at the start of school. She
knew that a girl’s two choices were nursing or teaching, and that she would choose
the second.

She made the debate team and turned out to be very good at it. She subscribed to
Time
and
Newsweek
, spent a year researching nuclear disarmament and Medicare, and won the statewide
competition. Other than a visit to her elementary school by one of its former students,
the TV star James Garner, when she was eight, debate was Liz’s first intimation that
there could be a life for her in the wider world. At sixteen she won a full-ride scholarship
to George Washington University. By then, the Herrings had regained their foothold
in the lower middle class.

Within a few years, by the early seventies, she was Elizabeth Warren, married to her
high school boyfriend, a NASA engineer; she had a degree in speech pathology from
the University of Houston and a baby daughter. A few years after that, following her
husband from job to job, she got a law degree at Rutgers and had a son. Her husband
wanted her to stay home and raise the kids, but she was restless. In 1978 she got
divorced and began teaching law at the University of Houston. She was a registered
Republican because the party supported free markets, which she thought were under
too much pressure from government.

That same year, 1978, Congress defeated a bill to set up a new consumer protection
agency, but it passed another law making it easier to declare bankruptcy. Elizabeth
Warren decided to pursue scholarly research on this obscure subject. She wanted to
find out why Americans ended up in bankruptcy court. She took the attitude of her
unforgiving mother. “I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she would
later say. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest
of us.”

With two colleagues, Warren spent the 1980s doing her research. And that was when
the first story she told, her own story, ran across the second, which went like this:

Starting in 1792 with George Washington, there were financial crises every ten or
fifteen years. Panics, bank runs, credit freezes, crashes, depressions. People lost
their farms, families were wiped out. This went on for more than a hundred years,
until the Great Depression, when Oklahoma turned to dust. “We can do better than this,”
Americans said. “We don’t need to go back to the boom-and-bust cycle.” The Great Depression
produced three regulations:

The FDIC—your bank deposits were safe.

Glass-Steagall—banks couldn’t go crazy with your money.

The SEC—stock markets would be tightly controlled.

For fifty years, these rules kept America from having another financial crisis. Not
one panic or meltdown or freeze. They gave Americans security and prosperity. Banking
was dull. The country produced the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.

Warren’s life began in those years, and although she had seen her share of rough times
as a girl, her parents and brothers were doing all right, and she managed to reach
the age of thirty in good financial shape.

Then came the late 1970s, early 1980s. “Regulation? Ahh, it’s a pain, it’s expensive,
we don’t need it.” So government started unraveling the regulatory fabric. What happened
next? The S&L crisis.

In the late eighties, seven hundred financial institutions went under just as Warren
and her colleagues were getting ready to publish their research on bankruptcies. What
they had found was just the opposite of what Warren expected, and it upended what
she had believed about markets and government. Most Americans in bankruptcy weren’t
deadbeats gaming the system. They were middle class, or wanted to be, and had done
everything they could to avoid ending up in court. They were working hard to keep
up, to afford a house (like Warren’s parents) in a district that still had decent
schools so that their children could stay in the middle class or reach it, but the
loss of a job, a divorce, an illness had taken their savings. They lived more and
more on credit and finally sought refuge in bankruptcy to avoid spending the rest
of their lives deep in debt. Most people in bankruptcy weren’t irresponsible—they
were too responsible.

As a girl Warren had known what debt meant. Now she began to see financial ruin through
her father’s eyes rather than her mother’s—not as a social shame, but as a personal
tragedy that was seldom the result of weak character. If anything, it was the result
of weak regulations. The more the banks pushed Congress to get rid of the rules, the
more people went broke. The numbers were exploding.

This work changed Warren’s life. She continued her research and writing for the next
two decades (Harvard hired her in 1992). She was asked to advise a commission on federal
bankruptcy law. She watched as the credit card companies and banks rolled over the
consumer groups, pouring millions of dollars into Congress. In 2005, with the help
of Democrats like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton, Congress passed a
law restricting the right to file for bankruptcy. It was a huge win for the business
lobby. She learned something about the ways of Washington.

And the second story continued.

In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management collapsed and almost took the investment banks
with it, showing that this increasingly autonomous financial world was perilously
linked together around the globe. A few years later, Enron fell, revealing that the
books were dirty. And the White House and Congress kept unraveling the fabric.

As wages stayed flat, debt kept more and more families afloat. As schools deteriorated,
the struggle of parents to keep their children in the middle class came down to owning
a house in the right school district. As the cost of those houses soared, parents
worked harder than ever. (With her daughter, Warren wrote a book about this cycle
of effort.) The banks realized that the middle class was the largest profit center
of all. They started pulling at the threads supporting mortgages, credit cards, and
consumer lending, and those, too, gave way. The regulators were spread out over seven
agencies, moving in seven different directions, and none of them had the consumer
as a main focus. It wasn’t hard for the banks to get these cops off the beat and start
selling increasingly dangerous mortgages, credit cards, even car loans. The banks
turned the promises American families made to pay them back into tranches of debt,
which they packaged and repackaged as securities, and sold off to investors.

Three things happened:

Profits soared.

Bonuses soared higher.

Risk entered the stratosphere.

Then everything fell to earth, and the bankers turned back to the American people
and said, “Whoa, there’s a real problem here, and you better bail us out or we’re
all gonna die.” So the American people bailed them out.