Glass House

If you are from or interested in southern Ohio, and you enjoyed [b:Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|27161156|Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|J.D. Vance|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463569814s/27161156.jpg|47200486] by J. D. Vance or [b:Knockemstiff|1704719|Knockemstiff|Donald Ray Pollock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1424959738s/1704719.jpg|1701841] by Donald Ray Pollock, then I encourage you to try this book. Instead of centering the story on his own experiences, as Vance did to talk about the woes of Applachian Ohio, Brian Alexander focuses on the town of Lancaster, especially its most famous employer, Anchor Hocking.

Alexander spent a lot of time doing interviews and other leg work to put together this book. It's a service to Lancaster and to the world that he made sure this story was told.

An excerpt:

“It’s not about making the product,” Sam Solomon said. “It’s about making money appear, and the 99 percent doesn’t understand that.”

The American economy had come a long way from the days when I. J. Collins could lasso some people he knew to kick in a few thousand dollars each and start the Hocking Glass Company. It had come a long way since 1938, when the first annual report of the combined Anchor Hocking featured a short note from Collins, four pages of financial tables that a seventh-grader could understand, and some comments about the numbers. Since those days, the American economy had advanced under the wise tutelage of financial experts trained in the subtle art of the acronym and the esoteric word, the secret codes that imbued the finely engineered tables and reports and footnotes—the pages and pages of footnotes and subfootnotes—with the sheen of brilliant scientific inevitability, the words flexing with the muscular bona fides of graduate school brains to justify the thousand-bucks-an-hour legal advice and the multi-million-dollar-deal percentages.

Those brains had been trained for years. Imagine the resources poured into them, the hours and days and months of molding. How could anybody working an H-28, or packing ware, or selling it be expected to know where the money went? They’d been trained to make a tangible thing, and to sell the thing for a little more than the thing cost to make, and then to use that profit to pay people, make better things, and slide a little dividend into the pockets of those who’d risked their money to invest in the creation. The idea was pretty simple. But America had come a long way—and had decided the idea was too simple.