A Trump pledge is falling flat as Ohio musical instrument plant closes
Source: msn/Reuters
8h
EASTLAKE, Ohio, April 17 (Reuters) - When Keith Czika learned the brass-instrument factory where he had worked for nearly 18 years was closing and his job was headed to China, the 62-year-old Ohioan focused on what he saw as a source of leverage: the plant’s ultimate owner, billionaire investor John Paulson, a close ally of President Donald Trump.
A three-time Trump voter, Czika raised the idea in early January with union colleagues of publicly calling out Paulson to try to save the Conn Selmer plant. The strategy was to pressure Paulson by linking the closure to Trump's pledge to revive American manufacturing. During the 2024 campaign, Paulson had criticized U.S. companies for offshoring jobs.
But the United Auto Workers’ public campaign — including a rally at which local officials assailed Paulson, social‑media videos and an online petition to the White House seeking Trump’s intervention — failed to avert the closure. The Eastlake, Ohio, factory is set to shut at the end of June, costing 150 jobs.
Conn Selmer, the largest U.S. band-instrument maker, will shift to China production of tubas, sousaphones and some French horns, Chief Executive John Fulton told workers in January, according to a video reviewed by Reuters. That accounts for nearly all of the Eastlake factory’s output. The failed effort underscores the limited political power of blue‑collar workers who form a core part of Trump’s base, even when their demands echo his populist “America First” agenda.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-trump-pledge-is-falling-flat-as-ohio-musical-instrument-plant-closes/ar-AA218T6x
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Even makers of really exceptional instruments, recognized by many players to have no peers, were absorbed into the growing colossus. Bach trumpets and trombones. Armstrong flutes. LeBlanc, only maker of extended range contrabass clarinet (and for a while, "octo-contra-alto" and "octo-contrabass" clarinets, for a long while the lowest wind instruments ever made. Selmer USA (NOT H. Selmer-Paris, thank whatever gods there might be). Only a few survive. Conn-Selmer is part of a larger conglomeration built around Steinway Corp. Whatever changes they make to band/wind instrument manufacturing will effect almost everybody, even if indirectly. All those debates in band class about which instruments were better are almost all moot now.
C. G. Conn started a band instrument company after the Civil War, after first making custom trumpet/cornet mouthpieces to accommodate a wartime injury to his lip. With lots of changes and improvements in the craft of instrument-making at the time (valved brass and saxophones were still expanding their roles, and other woodwinds were following the example of Theobald Boehm and A. Sax to modernize keywork, for example) that may have been THE absolutely ideal time to get into the business. Eventually along came the saxophone craze of the '20s, and Conn played into that well, with new inventions (Saxello, Conn-O-Sax, "mezzosoprano" saxophone (Sax's suggestion, but never implemented before) and lots of P.R., including the construction of at least two giant saxophones, one a huge model of an alto sax, the other a working subcontrabass saxophone. Then came The Depression. Then came WWII, when brass for shells became a strategic material (bye-bye, subcontrabass sax) and instrument mfgrs shut down. After the war they and other instrument makers rebounded, and several different brands stamped their products "Elkhart, Indiana" where so many instruments were made, with a huge population of specialized workers in the area. There have been a few startups in the 20th century to take advantage of that. But then "consolidation" set in, driven by the go-go stock market of the '80s, when mergers and acquisitions were indulged in so recklessly, damn the company traditions that were destroyed in the process.
There were actually a lot of other things in between, including Conn incubating workmen such as Beuscher and Holton who went on to their own companies, switching almost entirely to electronic organs(!) and virtually ceasing to be an instruments manufacturer before being bought up and hammered into a conglomerate of other historic brands. C.G. Conn even served as a member of Congress at one point!
All fading into history now. 