Bruce Springsteen’s remarkable body of work has tracked the declining fortunes of the white working class in the US since the 1970s. Beginning in the 1990s it also moved towards profoundly empathetic portrayals of migrants and offered a vision of a route into wider solidarities, a route spurned by the millions who have chosen Donald Trump and his politics of open racism and xenophobia.
Springsteen was 25 years old when, in August 1975, his magnificent third album, Born to Run, exploded into the world. By October he was on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. The title track, with its rushing wall of sound, was about getting out of the working class life into which Springsteen had been born, getting out in a muscle car, perhaps a Mustang:
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin’ out over the line
Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
Born to Run was followed by three albums — Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River and Nebraska — that, together, stand as arguably the greatest creative run in rock history.
In the these albums there’s no getting out. Factory on Darkness on the Edge of Town, is a dirge for a life consumed by the factory, and the price paid for “the working life” at home:
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy
Somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
The elegiac Racing in the Street, another of the songs on Darkness that swiftly took its place in the rock canon, is very different to Born to Run. It moves with a slow, contemplative sadness accumulating emotional weight. The working man comes home, washes up, and heads out to race his ’69 Chevy. The thrill of the car hurtling into the night holds off the emptiness for a while:
Now some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racin’ in the street
This time there is no escape, not even the dream of escape in Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, which came 10 years later. At home, waiting on the porch of her father’s house, his wife or girlfriend “stares off alone into the night / With the eyes of one who hates for just being born”.
In the title track on The River a young man with a pregnant wife gets a union card at 19, but soon finds that “lately there ain’t been much work / On account of the economy”. Along with the river there are songs about roads and cars, of course. A man comes across a wreck on an otherwise empty stretch of the highway, “blood and glass all over”. Another man whose marriage has come to ruin is driving a stolen car, finding himself hoping to be caught. There is a man with family who goes out for a ride and doesn’t come back.
Recorded in Springsteen’s bedroom on an four-track cassette recorder in 1982, during the early years of the Reagan presidency, Nebraska sometimes feels like an elemental howl of pain. Its characters — laid-off workers, small-time hustlers and loners — have been discarded by a system hardening by the year.
Laid-off workers drift into violence and despair. In Johnny 99, a former auto plant worker loses his job, gets drunk, and ends up on trial for a shooting. He tells the judge, “I got debts no honest man could pay / The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and takin’ my house away” and asks for the death sentence.
In 1984 Born in the USA turned Springsteen from a backstreets rock poet into a global celebrity. There was a new pop sensibility on some tracks but in My Hometown, the last of the album’s astonishing string of seven top-10 singles, the stores on Main Street are vacant, the textile mill is closing, and the foreman says, “These jobs are going, boys / And they ain’t coming back”. In Darlington County, a rollicking bar-band song, a drive across the country in search of work ends in an arrest. In Working on the Highway, another exuberant song, this time with a rockabilly feel, the character starts out working on the highway and then, after an arrest, does the same in a chain gang.
Seeds, possibly composed for but not included on the album, was often performed on the Born in the USA tour. The version on the Live 1975—85 album, released in 1986, is a snarling, crashing, confrontational blues-rock song about a family on the road, sleeping in their car, searching for work, work that is “gone, gone, gone”:
Parked in the lumberyard freezing our asses off
My kids in the back seat got a graveyard cough
Well I’m sleeping up in front with my wife
Billy club tapping on the windshield in the middle of the night
Says “Move along man move along”
A decade after Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen released The Ghost of Tom Joad, a stripped-down album of hushed, potent intensity, drawing intimate portraits of people on the underside of American life. In Born to Run transcendence was a young man rushing into the night in a souped-up car. Here “the highway is alive” because people are living under the bridges and “nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes”.
Youngstown, set in the Ohio steel town of the same name, and sung in the voice of a steelworker, traces a family’s history of labour — smelting iron in the mills and fighting in America’s wars. But now the mill is just “scrap and rubble” and the narrator’s father, who fought in World War 2, says, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”. It’s a devastating line.
Youngstown was one of the first American cities to be crushed by deindustrialisation. On September 19 1977 — which came to be known as Black Monday — Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly closed its Campbell Works, laying off 5,000 workers. The steel mills that had once run day and night began shutting down across the city:
That taconite coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay
About two thirds of city’s residents would leave, many moving south and west. The ruination ran across the industrial heartland — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Gary, Detroit. As Springsteen sang:
From the Monongahela Valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Deindustrialisation had begun to ravage working class communities in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and early 1980s. Cities that had been built around manufacturing lost a quarter to a third of their industrial jobs within a decade. About 4-million manufacturing jobs were lost between 1979 and 1984, and nearly 6-million more between 2000 and 2010.
Youngstown was the last of Springsteen’s great songs about deindustrialisation set in the Rust Belt in the Northeast and Midwest. Most of the work on The Ghost of Tom Joad is set in the southern borderlands, in California and Texas, and the characters are often migrants.
Across the Border is transcendent. A migrant, presumably in the Chihuahuan Desert, is on the eve of crossing the Bravo — known as the Rio Grande in the US — and into Texas to join his wife. The crossing is presented in allegorical terms, as an act of faith that, while it works as a wider metaphor, it is also concrete and concretely about migration:
For you I’ll build a house
High upon a grassy hill
Somewhere across the border
Where pain and memory
Pain and memory have been stilled
The title track anchors the album, and is perhaps the political fulcrum of Springsteen’s almost 50 years of recorded work. Springsteen first saw John Ford’s rendering of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath at 26 and immediately knew that he wanted to make similar work.
Steinbeck’s novel is about impoverished families driven from Oklahoma by drought and debt, making their way to California in search of work in the orchards and fields — but finding squatter camps, police violence and exploitation. Near the end of the novel, as Tom Joad — in flight after killing a cop — takes leave of his mother he tells her: “I been thinkin’ a hell of a lot, thinkin’ about our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hundred thousan’ good farmers is starvin’. An’ I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together...”
His mother worries that “they’ll cut you down” and Joad replies that “maybe a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one” and that if he must give his life:
“I’ll be all around in the dark — I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look — wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build — I’ll be there, too.”
Springsteen reprises this scene and builds on its universalism weaving stories of different kinds of Americans together, from people whose lives crumbled with the steel mills in Youngstown to people who have just come across the Rio Grande.
A decade later, he returned to the Rio Grande in Matamoros Banks on the Devils & Dust album. Set at the crossing between Matamoros and Brownsville the song begins with a man’s body floating in the river. It moves backward towards the moment he dove into the river after hearing a shout, presumably from the border patrol, and then into the longing that brought him to the river:
For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound…
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars...
Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
Across the Border and Matamoros Banks, animated by the same humanism Springsteen saw in Ford’s film and later in Steinbeck’s novel, called his audience into empathy for a new human drama. Many of the people who could have been characters in Youngstown, or the whole body of his earlier work, would spurn the call for empathy.
In Wrecking Ball, released in 2012 after the Occupy movement’s response to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Springsteen’s tone is often angry, even militant. Many of the songs are about unemployment. In Jack of All Trades a laid-off worker, perhaps foreshadowing Luigi Mangione, says, “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight.” In Death to My Hometown he revisits the theme of My Hometown but this time in fury rather than lament: “They destroyed our families’ factories and they took our homes / They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones”. As a gun cocks over martial music an older man tells a younger man to “be ready for when they come / For they’ll be returning sure as the rising sun”.
In his early albums, Springsteen longed to outrun the factory life of his father’s generation. But in Wrecking Ball, after the jobs have vanished, there is a nostalgia for labour as a source of lost dignity: “Freedom, son is a dirty shirt / The sun on my face and my shovel in the dirt”.
A special edition of the album ended with Swallowed Up (In the Belly of the Whale), an exquisite, haunting song about the personal existential pain of social crisis: “We’ve been swallowed up / Disappeared from this world”.
Occupy came and went, and then the movement around Bernie Sanders. But few of the steel workers who lost their jobs in Youngstown, and few of their children, made common cause with other spurned people, including migrants. Kamala Harris offered more of the same. Trump recognised that people were in pain and offered the compensation of racism and xenophobia, of participation in social sadism.
Trump’s political theatre, recently taken to the planetary stage in a paroxysm of shock and awe as he announced his long promised tariffs, pretends that the children and grandchildren of the steelworkers laid off in Youngstown have the same interests as “them big boys” that “did what Hitler couldn’t do”. It denies that they have the same interests as a people who came across the Rio Grande and are working two jobs at minimum wage. It moves from scapegoating migrants to blaming the suffering of the American working class on exploited workers in the Global South.
The psychic relief that people who have been rendered disposable can take in turning on people more vulnerable than themselves can only make things worse for everyone. The American cultural tradition that Springsteen inherited from Steinbeck via Ford offers so much more but it no longer has a meaningful form of political expression. Tom Joad is a ghost.
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