Caught in The Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism is Richard C. Longworth's trenchant and alternatively upsetting and inspiring 21st century look at America's quintessential small town/small city region, the Midwest. Published in 2008 by Bloomsbury USA, it's rife with content that's directly relevant to thinking about economic strategies for our own region.

"The Midwest of the Hudson Valley" is a term that can be fairly applied to our own slice of the Mid-Hudson region, the strip of small towns on both sides of the Orange-Ulster Counties boundary ranging from Newburgh to Ellenville, plus adjacent towns in Sullivan County. There is — or was — that same mix of rich farmland, a world city, small town manufacturing, and beautiful forests and lakes on the northern periphery.

Longworth's deeply informed look at what globalism has done, and will do, to the Midwest is directly relevant to thinking about our own future. While Longworth spent many years abroad as a senior foreign correspondent for one of America's powerhouse newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, his heart and soul are rooted in the small town heartland of his youth. This heartland stretches from Michigan to Minnesota, and from Ohio through Missouri. Its vibrant farms and factories supported middle class prosperity, with a brutal interruption by the Great Depression, for most of its citizens.

Until globalism turned that world upside down. Forever.

That world, in Longworth's eyes, is gone, gone, gone — a brutal fact that makes him sad to the core of his being, but also drives him to look at things straight on. This is the necessary step to figuring out how the heartland can redefine its future. He wants to jolt many of his fellow citizens out of the nostalgic illusion that their traditional heartland will, somehow, muddle through and snap back. It won't. Especially if people keep dreaming or allow themselves to get sidetracked by resentments of one flavor or another.

Four scenarios are unfolding among the small towns and small cities of the heartland: three are success stories, some more, some less. Successful scenario number one is very familiar in these parts: small towns within an hour's drive of a prospering metropolitan region are recycling themselves as bedroom communities for people who prefer small town living to the central city or suburbs.

That includes towns that are near big metropolises like Chicago or Minneapolis that are successfully redefining themselves as hot spots in the new global economy. It excludes places like Cleveland and Detroit that are likely on a permanent down spin. In the Midwest, there are more Clevelands than there are Chicagos.

For our Mid-Hudson region, we likely have the good fortune that New York City will follow the Chicago precedent of deep crisis, followed by a restructuring and redefinition that places it an even higher rank on the national urban hierarchy.

Physically, the center of these small towns look pretty much the same: the pretty courthouse and town offices, nice Victorian houses, the old high school and the like. Socially, it's a very different place. There's a mixture of old timers who stay put by finding jobs outside the community, and the newcomers. Both tend to be involved in town affairs, but these take on a new flavor when the real Main Street lies in downtown Chicago —or IBM's international headquarters in Westchester County.

Scenario two is comprised of a minority of small town success stories like Warsaw, Indiana, which has emerged as an international industrial cluster for designing and manufacturing orthopedics. Or a bevy of new kinds of steel manufacturing plants, based on recycling scrap metal into high end niche steel products, in small towns surrounding Chicago. Or bio-engineering of new farm crops.

That kind of success depends on two factors: first, an accident of history in the form of a first entrepreneur who comes from, or decides to land in, a given small town, or the location of the state's land grant university; second, a good local school system that provides motivated workers who enthusiastically learn the skills that enable them to stay in the town they like; and third, solid support from local government.

That kind of high-tech, niche manufacturing success story is quite possible in the Mid-Hudson region. We have an attractive physical and social landscape, and are close to major markets and international shipping points. Some of our schools are quite good, others more in need of improvement.

As to local governments, I'll let you assign the grade.

What is not possible is repeating traditional manufacturing based on a passable high school education and routine labor — not when Asians study hard and work hard for a fraction of the price. As long as economic borders remain open, traditional manufacturing is gone.

Scenario three is starkly somber: a major slice of Midwestern towns are literally dying as young people move out because of sheer lack of opportunities, grandparents and parents approach the grave, and that same lack of opportunity means that these dwindling towns do not share in the new wave of immigration which accounts for over half of America's demographic growth.

That's not such a common story in the Mid-Hudson and Catskill regions, but not unknown at all in towns more than two hours' drive from the metro New York's suburbs.

Scenario four is fortunately not part of the Mid-Hudson economic landscape, or likely to be. That's the movement of Chicago's infamous stockyards out to the surrounding countryside, and equally out of trade union territory.

The new slaughterhouses are run by multinationals like Cargill, and manned by Latino and Asian immigrant laborers. Many workers are conveniently illegal, which restrains demands for better wages and conditions. Plants are even more dangerous and satanic than when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle a century ago, to make Americans aware of what made it possible for us to eat such nice meat at such reasonable prices.

Yet these immigrant slaughterhouse towns are rebuilding, literally. What looks like a miserable wage here looks good to a peasant trying to scratch a living from hard, dry soil. Houses which were falling down for real, and not as a turn of phrase, are renovated. Streets are cleaned up. The slaughterhouse towns are indeed being born again.

Like the old downtown in Middletown.

Longworth finds the share of new immigrants in a town's population to be one of the best indicators of whether a place is successfully redefining itself in the new global economy. Or not. Immigrants have a shrewd sense of potential opportunities, and good networks for circulating the information.

By this measure, we can all think of multiple places in the Mid-Hudson Valley where things look tough now, but where immigrants are voting with their feet in the expectation of making a better future.

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