Beth Macy Returned Home to Ohio to Reckon with America’s Divisions

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: We turn now to polarization in America, which is explored in a new memoir by author and journalist Beth Macy, who wrote the bestselling book, “Dope Sick.” Through her own childhood, town of Urbana, Ohio, Macy investigates radicalization and the struggling education system in rural America. She joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how these divisions have been stoked over the last decade.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna. And Beth Macy, welcome back to the show.

 

BETH MACY: It’s great to be back. Thanks, Walter.

 

ISAACSON: So your new book is called “Paper Girl.” Let’s start with the obvious question. What’d you learn from being a paper girl back in Urbana…Urbana, Ohio? 

 

MACY: Well, you can’t call in sick ’cause they get really mad when their paper doesn’t show up. And so work ethic. And also I always say it was great training ground for being a reporter. Because you had to deal with all kinds of people and you had to negotiate when people didn’t want to pay you on collection day. And just great skills all the way around. 

 

ISAACSON: So you talk about those skills, and that’s in the book in a way. You talk a lot about education, but you say education isn’t just about learning knowledge, it’s about learning those social skills. Is that what’s we’re failing to do now, especially in the towns like you write about?

 

MACY: Yeah, I mean, my first call to a school counselor 40 years after I left that school, when I say what is the biggest challenge today with getting kids college ready or workforce ready? She tells me it’s, they don’t know how to human. I said, what do you mean? They don’t have the social skills? They don’t know the basic skills that I learned from delivering the paper every afternoon. So I thought I was gonna write a story about – and I did – about how we don’t have the structure in place to allow poor kids to go to college, which essentially saved my life. But after spending two years in Urbana, it’s more a story about how our K-12 schools are declining, such that people are dropping out, they’re not showing up, there’s a huge attendance problem, particularly after COVID and our public schools, which are the foundation of our democracy, are in really rough shape.

 

ISAACSON: Well, you started off as a local reporter in journalism and the book sort of chronicles the fact that local journalism has declined. Is that related to the fact that people in your family, people in your town now have their hair on fire about big old national issues that they wouldn’t have talked about 30 or 40 years ago, but they don’t know what’s happening with their neighbors?

 

MACY: Absolutely. I tell this story about my brother-in-law, John, who became very politicized, starting off with Rush Limbaugh and then Fox. And then in the mid-teens I say, Hey John, how are you doing? Because I only visit once or twice a year at that point. And he goes, deplorable. And he wants to immediately start, you know, debating me and my sister would have to intervene and say, we discussed this John. No politics. And, and yet when I’m starting to work on “Dopesick,” a book that comes out in 2018, it’s possible for John to go to the library and have somebody overdose in the stall next to him. And he has no idea that there’s a heroin epidemic. You know, because he doesn’t, these stories aren’t even be covered, being covered in his local news. And the fact-based institutions that many of us rely on are all behind a paywall. So he’s getting what he gets free with his cable package. He’s not reading the local news because it’s just a tiny thin shadow of its former self. And he’s hearing everything from basically opinion writers and speakers who are shouting at him and stirring up his central nervous system and making him addicted to various algorithms.

 

ISAACSON: Yeah, but in some ways you say maybe he’s out of touch, but isn’t it also that a lot of the media and the elite got totally out of touch too?

 

MACY: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. You know, when’s the last time you saw a national reporter really embed in a town like Urbana, Ohio? It just simply doesn’t exist. And most of our news is manufactured in cities like Washington and New York City. You know, it took me years to convince my publishers to let me write “Dopesick” because they didn’t see it as an issue that was happening in New York City. You know, I’m like, no, we’ve got a terrible heroin problem. It’s breaking out in our suburbs and our wealthy communities. And they thought Roanoke, Virginia, where I live, was just late getting it. So if you don’t travel in these places, which many people don’t, we all live in silos you might not know. And going back to my first book “Factory Man,” which came out in ‘14, which was a story about the aftermath of globalization charting. I mean, I really think of the three books as a kind of a trilogy. I was seeing all of these things you know, as early as 2012, but it was hard to get the gatekeepers to pay attention to them.

 

ISAACSON: One of the things that struck me when you talk about education is that people, or kids are not going to school in great numbers. They’re not showing up. When did that start and why?

 

MACY: Well, it starts before COVID, but it really gets exacerbated in 2020 with COVID. And one of the main people I follow is a woman named Brooke Perry, who is the school attendance officer. And she puts something like 150,000 miles on her car in a couple of years, traversing the county, picking up kids whose parents won’t send them to school. And one of the great shocks was how many families were quote, homeschooling. Not saying that they’re all not legit homeschooling, but because homeschooling in the state of Ohio has been deregulated, you no longer have to have teachers sign off on lesson plans. This was a new law enacted by the state legislature a couple years ago. It’s possible now for a parent who just doesn’t want to get up in the morning, perhaps doesn’t have the capacity to get up in the morning, send their kids to school, to pull their kids out from school to avoid truancy charges and say they’re homeschooling. So that was an unintended consequence of that law, I would say. And it, it was, it was really shocking to be, to shadow Brooke Perry and to just see the level of trauma that she sees on a daily basis. I mean, people siccing dogs at her, assaulting her, teenagers assaulting her. It really brought the mental health crisis into view.

 

ISAACSON: Well, another aspect of the education crisis is people not being able to just seamlessly go to college or community college using Pell Grants and other things. Is that something that we could solve?

 

MACY: Yes. If we invest in people and not corporations and billionaires. So when I went to college in 1982, I went to a state college, it cost about two plus grand a year. The Pell Grant covered my tuition, room and board, my books. It gave me work study jobs so I could have pizza and beer like everybody else. Today, that same student I follow, a young man named Silas, he couldn’t go to a four year college because it would only cover 30%. Right. So his, his, his dear mentor, his band director, his teacher talks him into doing a welding program at a community college. He gets full scholarships for it. And he doesn’t really understand the money. 

 

It’s rural America. So may, if you live in a city, you might not know that. We don’t have a bus that goes from Urbana to Marysville to Springfield to get Silas to his classes at the community college. And the kid goes through five clunker cars in the course of a 10 month program. Four full-time jobs, I didn’t have to work full-time. And the odds – and, and then a family with so much trauma and chaos that they are a constant drag on his psyche. And by golly, the kid makes it. And it’s a, it’s a great story. It’s a story of resilience. And when I shared a stage with him just about 10 days ago for the launch of the book, I said, Silas, what makes you so resilient? And he said, well, I didn’t have a family I could rely on. So I created my own, out of teachers, out of counselors. It’s the school. He’s gonna be a great success one day, but without a hardier education system, he, he’s a unicorn.

 

ISAACSON: So let’s talk about this kid, Silas, who’s one of the main characters in your book. His name is Silas James. And in some ways you say he was the counterpart to you, y’all were both in the band, that sort of thing. How did, tell me about his story, how you found him and why you made him the central character.

 

MACY: Well, when I first started going home, I would cast about talking to teachers and counselors and the present band director. And I was – ’cause I was looking for a young me that would help me illustrate this data that I was finding. And they all suggested Silas James. Its a small town. They all knew him. They had all helped him. And I just, the band, the marching band – I was president of the band my senior year – is really what kept me outta jail, kept me outta trouble. And a great affinity for my band director who’s long since passed away. And I saw that Silas had that with Mr. Sapp, who he has entered as David M. Dad in his phone. I mean, that’s how important. I had one stable parent. Silas had zero stable parents. I mean, for a time he lived with a caregiver who molested him in his early teens while his mom was in prison for drug related charges and his dad was on his way to an overdose death. So he really needed the support of these folks. And, you know, when I met him, I thought, this is a kid that, whose story really illustrates all the data that I’m finding on the ground.

 

ISAACSON: There’s a sentence in your book that just of course hit me, as I think you would’ve expected. It’s, “my family had once been proud of me.” So walk me through the family saga and why you would write that sentence.

 

MACY: Well, I was the first in the family to go to college. I’m much younger than my siblings. I was the midlife accident. And the only one to really move out of state and were pretty different. And when I started achieving some success as a journalist, they were very proud of me. But in the teens, during Trump’s first term, you know, my brother who was my closest in age who we’d been pretty close with, and he would come see my kid when they were in place unfriended me on Facebook because of quote, “all the liberal crap you post.” And I am pretty careful about what I post. I post fact-check articles typically from the New York Times or the Washington Post, including some of my own articles. 

 

And to, to sort of have my brother you know, malign my profession, have my friends malign my profession and say they hate the media. I said, well, Joy, you still love me, right? Yeah, of course. I love you. I, well I’m the media too, and when I write a piece for the New York Times, they’ll assign some Ivy League graduate young fact checker on it who will spend three days on an opinion piece making sure that my opinions are based on real data. And, you know, she came back to me with, well, who fact checks the fact checkers? And really angry in a way I hadn’t seen before. Now she later apologized, but at some point we have to be responsible for the truth that we believe. And you know, I was just again, really shocked at the level of conspiracy theories just running a roughshod over my home community.

 

ISAACSON: That notion of conspiracy theories done in the recesses of the internet also plays in to your ex-boyfriend Bill. You decide to call out of the blue, I guess for the sake of the book. Tell me about that story.

 

MACY: It was definitely for the book, Walter. I wasn’t trying to get back with my ex-boyfriend. No, but he was once the most liberal person I knew. And we dated like for a year in 1985 or so. And he was a journalist and as he described it a NPR tote bag or PBS tote bag carrying liberal. And a mutual friend who would come to my events when I would talk about my other books in Ohio said, wow, you wouldn’t believe Bill, he’s gone from Bernie to Jill Stein to Trump to – ohhh he’s even gone Trump. And I said, what do you mean? So I got the idea. I texted him out of the blue. I said, I write books now. I’m doing this book on polarization. I’d love to talk to you about your shift in attitude. So we set up, I must have 10 hours of recordings with them. And over the course of a year and a half, he just, I saw him get angrier and angrier and, until finally he emerges as the lead spokesperson for the anti Haitian contingency in Springfield, Ohio, in the lead up to the 24 election. Where, you know, Vance says, and Trump says they’re eating the pets, they’re eating the dogs, and there he is on PBS NewsHour. And there he is all over the news on the front page of the Springfield paper. 

 

And he’s leading rallies and he’s posting things on Twitter about or X about the great replacement theory. And in February, I had finished the book, but I had to rewrite some of the end because he didn’t believe in Obamacare. He was 61 when I first met him. Again, he didn’t have health insurance because he thought it was a racket on the middle class. And in February he gets pneumonia and he waits too long to go to the hospital and he dies. And when I talked to his daughter some weeks later, she basically described the same thing Bill had described about how his, he felt the Democrats had turned on him, and then his community turned on him when he wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. And he found his community in the internet instead. He would watch at the height of this, when I first met him, he was watching his news from Cyprus or Russian pr, well-known Russian propaganda website. And he was so angry. And his daughter says, the internet killed my dad.

 

ISAACSON: Your brother Tim is among those who unfriended you in Facebook, but one of the nice things about this book is that you finally have a reconciliation with him. In some ways that’s a metaphor perhaps, of how we can solve some of these grander problems. Tell me about that.

 

MACY: Yeah, thanks for understanding that. Yeah, we hadn’t spoken in a couple years and because I was going back regularly, I would spend – for two years, I would spend about a week a month in Urbana and I would visit with my family and interview my friends and all these other people that I interviewed. And Tim and I started spending time together. And that’s a really important, like I get at every book event I do, people go, Help! How are we gonna get through Thanksgiving? And I say, you gotta spend time getting to know each other as people again. And what are the things in your family, you might disagree on politics, but what are the things in your family that you remember fondly that, that you’re proud of? 

 

And with my family, we love to fish. Like we didn’t have any money, but we could, we could afford to like get our own night crawlers and go out to Muzzy’s Lake and go fishing. And that was something we did. So a couple years ago, my husband and I bought this modest little cabin up in the mountains and Tim loves to fish, so invited him up. We start spending time together, we start having these really moving conversations. Politics rarely factors in. At one point, I have a non-binary child named Sasha. Tim has never known a non-binary person before this. And Sasha’s a professional musician and Tim has heard their music and really likes it. They’re in a band called Palmyra and he starts coming to Palmyra shows and he says in a very tender voice, he says, tell me about Sasha. Do they still date girls? And because they asked such curiosity, I instinctively mirrored back his tone. And I said, yes, they’re dating a young woman now. And I mess up the pronouns too. 

 

So, so meeting our relatives that might not have the same experience with diversity that we have, meeting them with grace, not just judging them or blowing up, going zero to 60 like I did with some of my other relatives. You know, that taught me a lot. And, and Tim really helped me with that. And at one point he brings up the fact that he’s gonna vote for RFK. This is before Trump was, you know, the main candidate. And I just held my tongue. I said in my head, not my cup of worms, but I’m not gonna say anything because I’m loving this moment with my brother. And we got each other back.

 

ISAACSON: Beth Macy, thank you so much for joining us.

 

MACY: Thank you, Walter.