On May 22nd, British Steel, which is the United Kingdom’s second-largest steelmaker, went into liquidation. It hasn’t been easy to manufacture steel in the U.K. for a number of years. The country’s high energy costs and property taxes make it an inhospitable place for heavy industry, even compared with other European countries. But it was Brexit—specifically, the unresolved, purgatorial, shapeless Brexit that Britain finds itself in, three years after deciding to leave the European Union—that carried British Steel over the edge. Last year, with uncertainty stalking the economy, orders began to dry up. In April, because the Brexit negotiations were not complete, the company was hit with a hundred-and-twenty-million-pound bill, as part of the E.U.’s emissions-trading plan. At a court hearing the following month, British Steel, which had revenues of 1.2 billion pounds last year, revealed that it would run out of cash within a week. Since then, the company, whose origins go back to the industrial revolution, and whose evolution maps the story of British manufacturing, has been kept alive by the government. The current Prime Minister, Theresa May, has not yet left, and her successor, probably Boris Johnson, has not yet arrived. Desperate to avoid a spectacular bankruptcy in the interlude, the state has been paying British Steel’s bills and the salaries of its workers, while looking for a buyer to take four blast furnaces, named after English queens, and a two-thousand-acre steelworks off its hands.

The government set a deadline for the end of June to receive bids for British Steel. On June 28th, I travelled to Scunthorpe, in North Lincolnshire, where the company is based. A Moravian chemist named Maximilian Mannaberg poured Scunthorpe’s first steel, on March 21, 1890. The town sits on a broad, fertile plain not far from the North Sea. The roads are wide. The air smells slightly of coke ovens. Until 1936, Scunthorpe was a village, part of a collection of hamlets, fields, iron mines, and workers’ cottages strung around a giant amalgam of three competing steelworks—Appleby-Frodingham, Redbourn, and Normanby Park—that together built a century of British railways, steel rods, warships, and bridges. (Scunthorpe’s town crest includes the heraldic emblem of a “Blast-Furnace issuant therefrom Flames all proper.”) By 1967, Britain was the second-largest steel producer in Europe, after Germany, and more than twenty-five thousand people worked in Scunthorpe’s furnaces and mills. The place was known as a “boom town Eldorado,” according to the local paper. These days, mainly as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms, the U.K. makes less steel than Belgium. Scunthorpe’s three steelworks have shrunk to one, and the town has a lung-cancer problem. In 2016, what had become British Steel was sold to a group of private-equity investors, named Greybull Capital, for one pound. The same year, in the E.U. referendum, people in Scunthorpe voted for Brexit by a margin of two to one.

Des Comerford, who runs a menswear store in the town, picked me up from the station. In the seventies, soon after he left school, Comerford broke his pelvis. When he came out of the hospital, his job at a shop had gone. “Who came to my aid and savior? British Steel, in Scunthorpe,” he said. Comerford, who is sixty-two, worked for a year and a half as a shunter, tipping molten slag out of huge ladles from the furnaces. (Scunthorpe’s motto, “May the Heavens Reflect Our Labours,” comes from the way that the slag used to light up the night sky: it was visible to trawlers fishing at sea.) There was a “Save Our Steel” poster in the window of Comerford’s store, which is called Fallen Hero. He explained that the results of the Brexit vote in Scunthorpe had been a culmination of decades of neglect by London and a sense of being outmaneuvered by rival E.U. countries, which better protected their steel industries. “That was a defiance. That was ‘Enough,’ ” Comerford told me. “That was like saying to the government, ‘You’ve left us stranded.’ ”

Nobody in Scunthorpe has much time for Greybull Capital, the previous owners of British Steel. (In 2017, one of Greybull’s other investments, Monarch Airlines, went bust overnight, leading to the repatriation by the government of a hundred thousand holidaymakers—the largest airlift of British citizens in peacetime.) But the company has had lacklustre owners before. The priority now was to sort out Brexit. Scunthorpe’s M.P., Nic Dakin, a member of the Labour Party, voted to stay in the E.U. and now wants a second referendum. “There is a mood of anger towards our local M.P.,” Comerford said, describing Dakin’s positions as a betrayal. (Dakin, a former teacher in Scunthorpe, is a member of a cross-party group of officials and politicians trying to find a buyer for British Steel. “Nobody voted Leave to lose their job,” he told me.) Recently, Comerford went to a meeting, at Scunthorpe’s soccer stadium, of Nigel Farage’s insurgent Brexit Party, which has proposed that “a national strategic corporation” take ownership of British Steel. “They were the first political party that showed a genuine interest and desire and ideas of how to save the steel plant,” Comerford said. “It was fantastic. And do you know? Most of it was common sense.”

Since the spring, when Theresa May’s Brexit deal suffered its third defeat in Parliament and Britain’s departure from the E.U. was delayed for a second time, a kind of disassociation has set in. Even though the Brexit conundrum remains almost entirely intact—the country is divided, the E.U. is its largest trading partner, and the Irish border is still the Irish border—an idea has taken hold, particularly among Brexiteers, that a parallel, straightforward departure has been possible all along. There is a clear path, which, either out of incompetence or for some darker reason, Britain’s politicians have refused to take. The myth of a good Brexit contends that it is not leaving the E.U. that is damaging the U.K.’s standing in the world, or vulnerable businesses like British Steel; it is merely the way that the enterprise has been conducted so far. “It’s the indecision that is doing us,” Paul McBean, a representative for Community, Britain’s largest steelworkers union, who has worked at the Scunthorpe plant for forty years, told me. “I do negotiations for a living. The negotiation side of it has just been absolutely useless.”

In recent weeks, the contest to replace May, which is between Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, an ostensibly moderate former Health Secretary (and the incumbent Foreign Secretary), has become a competition to say the most macho things possible about the resumption of talks with Brussels. In late June, Johnson promised to take Britain out of the E.U. by October 31st—the current Brexit deadline—“do or die.” Hunt followed that by promising to stop negotiations a month early if no agreement is in sight, to prepare the country for a No Deal exit. “We won’t blink as a country,” he said.

Quite how any of this will play out in reality is another matter. Brexit was supposed to have happened by now, which means that the summer of 2019 is a badly timed moment of transition for the process. The U.K.’s chief Brexit negotiator, Oliver Robbins, is about to step down. The civil servant in charge of the country’s No Deal preparations, a thirty-three-year-old official named Tom Shinner, has also left the government. Neither Johnson, a Brexiteer who has alternately cheer-led and heckled from the sidelines, nor Hunt, who voted Remain, have had any hands-on experience of the negotiations. Recently, when Hunt promised six billion pounds to Britain’s farmers and fishermen, to cover any losses that might result from a No Deal departure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, who is likely to lose his job soon, pointed out that the Treasury wouldn’t have that kind of money to spare. (According to Hammond, a No Deal exit would cost the British government ninety billion pounds.) In the case of steel, if Britain fails to agree with the E.U. on a quota for exports, then the bloc could immediately impose tariffs of twenty-five per cent. “No Deal means no steel,” Dakin told me.

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At an industrial park on the edge of town, I stopped by the Bradbury Group, which uses steel to make security doors. Tim Strawson, who founded the company in 1991, voted for Brexit but was having some doubts. “I wanted Britain to have control over its own destiny,” Strawson said. “I’m not sure that I made the right choice.” Strawson was dismayed by the performance of May’s government, but he also acknowledged the daunting complexity of attempting to redraw Britain’s trading relations with the E.U. Although his factory is only three miles from British Steel, Strawson did not know how much, if any, of the processed steel that he buys comes from the plant. The nature of E.U. supply chains means that steel might leave Scunthorpe and cross several borders before returning to his factory to be turned into a door. If the steelworks closed, the damage would fall most obviously on Strawson’s staff, many of whose families work for the plant or in its direct supply chain. “It would be a disaster for the town if British Steel went, a big disaster,” Strawson said. I asked him if he had changed his mind about Brexit. “If I was sticking with my head,” he replied, “the logical answer should be to remain.”

In the afternoon, there was an emergency meeting of the North Lincolnshire Council, to support the steelworks. The council chamber, which overlooks the town square, was opened this year and painted white. Steel girders, stamped “British Steel SRSM”—from Scunthorpe’s rail-and-section mill—sloped from ceiling to floor. There was no real purpose to the meeting, except to express the town’s fear and its desperation to be spared the closure of the works. (When the June deadline arrived, there were about ten bids for British Steel, although it is not known how many came with the intention to break it up.) “We all know what effect it would have, the loss of twenty thousand-plus jobs across North Lincolnshire—you don’t have to wax lyrical about that,” Len Foster, a Labour councillor who has worked for British Steel for forty-four years, told the chamber. Margaret Armiger, a Conservative councillor, described her father, in the early days of the Second World War, cycling more than a hundred miles to find a job at the steelworks. Another Labour councillor, Tony Gosling, who worked in a plate mill until 2015, read out the names of British steelworks that have closed since the eighties, like a list of the dead. “Consett, Corby, Ebbw Vale, Hartlepool, Llanwern, Ravenscraig, Redcar, Rotherham, Sheffield, Shelton, Shotton, Stanton and Staveley, Worthington,” he said. “Don’t let the light go out on another community.” Brexit was barely mentioned, because it was something that most politicians in Scunthorpe, Labour and Conservative, agree on. It was something that most of the people in town had wished for, because things could not carry on as they were. Now they were praying to be saved.

A lot of kids grow up in New Orleans not knowing much about jazz. That was the case with me and my sisters. Never mind that the clarinettist Pete Fountain was always on television back then, or that our neighborhood was only a ten-minute drive from where the jazz master Jelly Roll Morton once lived. It was the early nineteen-seventies, and we weren’t interested in a man that dead. Nor did we care that our tiny house was three blocks from the tiny house where the trumpet player and composer Terence Blanchard was growing up. He was just another boy at the bus stop. We never heard him play.

But, when I was in the third grade, we found a Zenith stereo under the Christmas tree and the Louis Armstrong album “Hello, Dolly!” perched just so in the fake snow. Armstrong looked awful on the cover, all toothy and sweaty. His name was in fat red letters across the top and, in the black, white, and beige image below, he looked feverishly pale. That cover was clearly the work of white people. No black man would ever have approved that much beige. And yet “Hello, Dolly!” made us so happy. Listening to it, I could feel my ears popping open. Scholars now might call the recordings boilerplate Louis, but there’s no such thing. My favorites were “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “Hey, Look Me Over,” and the title track, along with “Jeepers Creepers.” Eight-year-olds love the word “peepers.”

Armstrong sounded happy—like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. He was hip to some delightful, mysterious fact. That aura of happiness has amazed and confounded Armstrong fans for more than a hundred years. How could Louis Armstrong, who was born indisputably black at the height of Jim Crow, in New Orleans, and raised in a rock-’em-sock-’em neighborhood known as the Battlefield, and whose family ate from dumpsters and who landed at least twice in juvenile detention, for relatively minor infractions—how could he be so happy? In his own time, he caught hell for it, and, occasionally, he still does. Some musicians called it false or, worse, “tomming,” to gain favor with white audiences. Others were more loving. As Billie Holiday famously said, “Louis toms from the heart.”

But that happiness seems to have come from somewhere deep down, and you can see it, I think, in an eight-second film that the journalist and Armstrong sleuth James Karst recently found and has written about, in the magazine 64 Parishes. If the film is what he thinks it is, and what the jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern agrees it is, and what the Armstrong biographer and Louis Armstrong House Museum curator Ricky Riccardi says he’s almost sure it is, then it may be the most significant finding of Armstrongalia in more than thirty years.

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The silent footage, taken by unknown cameramen in 1915 or thereabouts, captures a busy corner in downtown New Orleans, at the intersection of Dauphine and Canal streets, on what appears to be a sunny day. The action moves a hair faster than the reality likely did, as in a Buster Keaton movie. White people are hurrying in every direction—men in three-piece suits and women wearing long-sleeved blouses buttoned up to here and skirts flowing down to there. In their haste, the people sometimes brush against one another. Only a few glance into the camera. Then a nimble black newspaper boy enters the frame, just after the three-second mark. At first, his back faces the lens. Then he turns around and models the front page of the day’s paper, sidestepping the white pedestrians—easy, like a dancer. The boy is ever so relaxed and natural, like Maurice Chevalier walking the Champs-Élysées. He’s thin and dark-skinned; he wears long pants, rolled-up shirtsleeves, and a newsboy cap. He’s on the tall side; he might be a mature eleven-year-old or a dewy teen-ager. When he smiles at the camera, it’s almost impossible not to smile back. He’s friendly. He’s funny. And he’s Louis.

At least, I think so. I’ve watched it a half-dozen times. Karst has done more than that. He’s hired a graphics expert to measure the boy’s features and compare them to later images of Armstrong as a man. He’s contacted all of the best-known Armstrong experts and—despite a few hedges—he’s found the closest thing he’ll likely find to consensus. “I do think this is indeed our man,” Morgenstern, the jazz scholar and friend of Pops, wrote to Karst in an e-mail. “There’s a special aura Louis had and it’s there to me.”

Not every detail in the film fits what’s known about Armstrong’s youth. Armstrong was not a tall man; he peaked at about five feet six. Nor was he particularly slim until his final years. And, depending on the month when the film was shot, he could have been as old as fourteen. “The most I could say is that it could be him—there’s certainly enough facial similarity,” Bruce Raeburn wrote in an e-mail to Karst. For more than forty years, Raeburn curated the Hogan Jazz Archive, in New Orleans, which specializes in oral histories of and research into the earliest forms and practitioners of local music. “He seems taller and thinner and maybe a bit old compared to the two waif’s home images we have,” Raeburn conceded. “But teens grow up fast.”

Getty Images, which has featured the film on its Web site since 2007, has yet to verify its provenance, except to say that it was shot in New Orleans around 1915. It’s unclear exactly why cameramen would be collecting B-roll images of that particular corner downtown. A big hurricane hit the city that year, but the buildings in the film appear unscathed.

Karst thinks that the boy in the film is hawking a copy of the old New Orleans Item, an afternoon paper that later merged with the Times-Picayune. But he’s not yet found the headline we see, “BANDITS WRECK N.O. TRAIN,” in the microfilmed stacks of the Item, or in any newspaper of the time. That headline could have run in an early edition of the paper that’s not kept in the city archive, or perhaps it’s been lost. In his memoirs, Armstrong wrote about a number of jobs that he held as a boy in his home town—scavenging for metal, hauling and selling coal, collecting salable junk, washing dishes, delivering milk, demolishing houses, offloading bananas from ships, playing the cornet at jazz funerals and honky-tonks, and peddling the Item. The city’s census confirms that black boys were selling papers around that time. The 1910 census notes four newsies listed as black; the 1920 census mentions five. And the corner of Dauphine and Canal is a quick walk from where young Louis is believed to have lived, with his mother and sister, and across the street from where the Item later reported him selling newspapers as a youth.

These are the facts that Karst believes place Louis at the scene and in the film. But there is also an intangible quality that can’t be fact-checked: the aura that Morgenstern mentioned, which makes this eight-second film feel like a diamond in a bucket of glass. The newsie, in a matter of seconds, gives a star turn, maybe his first, without ever picking up a horn.

Armstrong rarely missed an opportunity to talk about his earliest years back home. His memoir, “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” is filled with stories about the rounders and other characters that he knew as a child in the Battlefield, people who sometimes took advantage of him but who also rooted for him to succeed. (Black Benny Williams, a wife beater and one of the greatest drummers Louis had ever known, was a kind of fairy god-hustler.) Armstrong describes his mother’s good food; he talks about arguing with his sister, Beatrice, a.k.a. Mama Lucy, and babysitting two stepbrothers, his father’s children from a later marriage (Henry was sweet, Willie not so much).

“I came up the Hard way, same as lots’ of people,” Armstrong wrote in 1970, a year before he died. But in all the stories he told about his childhood—and he had plenty—he didn’t equate “hard” with “unhappy.” No doubt, he could fib. He claimed to be born on the conveniently historic date of July 4, 1900, though a baptismal record shows his actual birth date as thirteen months later. (The late jazz historian Tad Jones found the document at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, on Canal Street, in 1988—the last great discovery of Armstrong-related primary-source material.) But no amount of scholarly digging has upended or undermined that bright and apparent tendency toward happiness. “It’s a funny thing how life can be such a drag one minute and a solid sender the next,” Armstrong wrote.

Yes, Louis’s mother likely took suitors to pay the bills. Yes, he saw violence in New Orleans that children should never see. Yes, he had to work from such a young age that he never finished school. But it seems that his mother and grandmother, his sister and father and stepmother, made him feel that their troubles were not so fully his. Plus, he says that they were funny, particularly his mother, Mayann. And when music entered Armstrong’s consciousness—from the time he wore short pants and sang four-part harmonies for coins with the other neighborhood children—it appears to have made up for most everything else that was missing from his life, which is something that music can do.

I almost cried when I saw the film that Karst found. The newsie isn’t much older than I was that Christmas when jazz came to our house. He sure looks smarter, though. Even in silence, he seems to be aware of a world beyond that intersection and its hard-faced passersby. This black boy who can smile so kindly into the camera in New Orleans in 1915. It’s an extraordinary feat. Armstrong looked happy when he felt he had reason to be, just like everybody else. Except he seemed to see his reasons more consistently, more vividly, than the rest of us. That’s what this little sliver of film appears to be saying—right there in black-and-white.

In “Margin Call,” Amy Davidson Sorkin writes about the Democratic Party’s moving margins.

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