BANGOR DAILY NEWS • June 20, 2023
“Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry” by Michael Hillard explores how Maine became to the paper industry what Detroit once was to the automobile industry, as well as how the industry fell from those heights. More than 32,000 paper makers and loggers worked in Maine at the industry’s peak in 1967. Today that number is less than 7,000, according to the Maine Department of Labor. In his book, Hillard argues that Wall Street greed drove that collapse. The argument has implications for today’s political and economic moment. Hillard hopes that the history of Maine’s paper industry can help inform discussions about the role of capital and labor. But he also wants to share the history of the workers in that industry before they are gone.