c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)
UNDATED _ Chicago has become a banana republic.
It has reached this status not because of its intolerably poor sports teams, whose names I cannot bring myself to mention, but because Dayton-Hudson, the carpetbagger firm from Minneapolis which bought out Marshall Fields some years ago, has decided that it is safe to treat Chicago like it is, say, El Salvador. Or like it is United Fruit and Chicago is Guatemala.
It dared, without notice and without warning, to close down the making of Frangomint Chocolates in Chicago and fire a couple hundred candy makers, most of them African-American or Hispanic American. It is a crime that calls to heaven for vengeance.
This mini-event, the first phase in what is likely to be a long Frangomint War, is an object lesson in the arrogance of power, in the unchecked ignorance and insensitivity of all too many American business leaders. They think they can do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t cross the boundaries of existing laws, even if their victim happens to be a world-class city.
Chicagoans now know what it is to be a small company town that can be treated like dirt by a faraway company. They will have more reason than ever to sympathize with workers and communities everywhere who are subjected to the insensitive ignorance of the new industrial barons.
Dayton Hudson is not apologetic. The decision had been made, its officials informed Mayor Richard M. Daley, and that was that. The next thing they will want to do is take down the clock in front of Fields and call the store the”Dayton Store.” They may as well. The consensus among Chicagoans seems to be that Marshall Fields isn’t what it used to be because the Dayton clan and their hired guns are innocent of the slightest touch of class.
They don’t understand what the store means and what Chicago is. The seductively tasty Frangomints are both a symbol of Chicago and a symbol of the ham-handed insensitivity of a company which knows how to run Target stores, but hasn’t a clue about the Fields tradition.
To be fair, not all business leaders in this country are like the Daytons. However, all too many of them are. They don’t give a hoot about local communities or the people who live in them, whether they be banana-growing peons in Central America, coal towns in Kentucky, textile towns in New England or Chicago.
Some disruptive social changes are perhaps necessary in an allegedly globalized market place, but how much money does the Dayton gang save by transferring a small candy-making operation to Pennsylvania? The change is not justified by economic reasons but by the sheer insensitive arrogance of corporate executives. In a culture where a few extra pennies of stockholder dividends is all that counts, who cares about a handful of workers in Chicago, or the wrath of the city or symbolic importance of Frangomints?
What else can we expect from a state that has just elected a wrestler its governor?
Presumably the Daytons figure that the noise will die down. They don’t understand the mentality of Chicago or of any other major city that is treated with open contempt. I, for one, will never buy another box of the mints or anything else at Fields, and I’m sure there are many others who feel the same way.
Carpetbaggers are within their economic rights to buy up local firms and do with them and their workers what they want. But those who have patronized such firms are within their rights to say,”already, all right, enough is enough!” There are, it will be said, necessary costs for the nation’s flourishing economy. Frangomints had to go in the name of progress. Chicagoans are reactionary and protectionist tribalists who stand in the way of progress. The mayor of Chicago is nothing more than the chief of an unimportant tribe. The notion that a Frangomint war is appropriate is simply”protectionism.” Yeah? Well, Dayton-Hudson is guilty of a monumental public relations gaffe. If they are not quick to correct it, they will have a lot more trouble.
IR END GREELEY