New York, after all, controlled over a quarter of the nation's banking reserves. More and more you found yourself nudging to New You liked Calvin Coolidge.īy the time you took over the plant, the additions you built were too expensive to finance through any of the banks in your town, which was now a small city. Getting more valuable the more business they do.' Calvin Coolidge once said, 'The man who builds a factory builds a temple the man who works there worships there.' You agreed. They have business, just like anybody else, and they're valuable just like any other business, Months older I discovered that rivers weren't invented just for kids to monkey with, nor yet to make a home for fish. Group of boys take over a rundown sawmill and get it to turn out a profit: 'Up till then a fiver didn't mean anything to me but a thing to fish or swim in,' the narrator said, 'but before I was many You grew up reading the adventure novels in the 'Mark Tidd' series by Clarence Budington Kelland, an author prominent in the national Republican Party, and your favorite was the story in which a Town's grandchildren, too, might enjoy its fruits-was late a time or two paying off a note. Membership on any number of company boards and fraternal orders and community chests and church committees, the bank let it slide when your father-who had made sacrifices to expand his plant in the hopes that the

Your father founded it perhaps to start things up he cadged a loan from the father of the man you bank with now. Imagine you are the proprietor of one of these concerns.

One of these factories, locals point to them with pride, because they are what make their little town prosper, and because all over the world foundries use machine parts inscribed with the town's name. Although no one who didn't have to would ever venture inside Throw up great clouds of smoke, churning out vast pools of cement, cords of lumber, spools of rolled steel, machine parts of every size and description.

It is June 1959, and, three shifts a day, they With modest bungalows and named for trees and exotic heroes and local luminaries, interrupted at intervals by high-steepled churches. Imagine you live in a town of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred thousand souls-in Indiana, perhaps, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Tennessee-with a colonnaded red-brick city hall at its center, a Main Street running its breadth, avenues rimmed Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

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