Newsweek took stock of the American Dream in Springfield, Ohio, in 1983. A taste of what things look like today.
One puzzle piece left on the cutting room floor after we had finished up a story for the Christian Science Monitor on economic decline, hope and hopelessness in Springfield, Ohio, was mention of a special edition of Newsweek from the spring of 1983. The magazine dedicated an entire 160-page special edition to Springfield and it is astonishing: not a mere story done on the place, but the entire history of America told through the lens of this fascinating little town and five families with varying circumstances — a marvel of journalism and storytelling. Chicago’s Harold Washington Library had preserved a copy and it reveals as much about today’s election as it did when, during another angst-ridden time, Newsweek reporters went searching for the state of The American Dream.
What they found, in a year after a large Recession had left the middle class reeling and trust in government was low was … depressing. The mammoth Crowell-Collier publishing plant had long shuttered, once churning out some of our land’s great literary accomplishments. International Harvester, the big agricultural machine producer and economic anchor, was on the decline and has largely been ever since. In 1982, the company had hemorrhaged $1 billion of its worth in just the last quarter of the year.
“The times have not been hospitable to dreaming,” Newsweek concluded.
If Springfield’s decline had more than come and gone more than 33 years ago, imagine how folks feel that it’s recovery has been fragmented and, in recent times, again on the decline. The story for CSM hinged off of a recent Pew study that showed Springfield’s middle class had declined more than any other urban area in the US between 2000 and 2014.
Consider that. Thirty-three years ago, we were having an existential moment about The American Dream and found that those who had found it in Springfield were suffering, along with the rest of the middle class. In Springfield’s case — and it’s indicative of plenty of former strongholds of the middle class, as well as urban areas around the U.S. — it went through that period of decline in the 1980s only to hit the walls of the technological revolution, free-trade bonanzas and Great Recession. In other words, what folks their imagined was the bottom became more and more decline.
Someone like Donald Trump starts to make sense. Both major parties have betrayed their so-called primary focus — the middle class — for so many years in so many different ways that the angry undercurrent expressed primarily through Trump and Bernie Sanders of the 2016 election hardly begins to capture the depth of that sentiment.
The thing I found about Springfield Trump supporters in particular — compared to the feverish, almost deity-like reverence from covering Trump supporters at rallies in South Carolina — was their lack of conviction, even if they planned to vote for the guy. I thought I’d found the perfect gung-ho Trump supporter in the form of Carl Carroll, a construction manager who’s banking on the old Crowell site becoming the new hub of Springfield’s reinvigoration. He even goes so far as to put Trump bumper stickers on his friends’ trucks — they laugh it off. Most aren’t that into politics.
When I was hanging around the old Crowell-Collier plant site, he and a few others happened to be hauling some stuff away. Carroll pulled out a postcard-sized picture of the old Crowell site and pointed to where things used to be with his pinky. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the way things were, and a blueprint in his mind if a developer would take him seriously. Crowell would be the perfect center of a Springfield renaissance, he thought. “I think it will happen,” he said of the redevelopment. “I know it will happen.”
And while he thinks Trump’s business acumen is the best thing for the country, it takes a little longer conversation to realize there’s a depth to that conviction. He worries about whether Trump would make massive mistakes — like start the wrong war . He’s not sure whether Trump, despite being larger than life, has the power to affect anything in his own life, such as the redevelopment of the Crowell site.
I say this to point out that Trump supporters are often portrayed to be slavishly devoted zealots secretly (or not-so-secretly) hoping for the rise of white America. There are elements of that in play, for sure, for far too many, but Springfield helps show things are often a little more complicated.
It’s a good place to keep our eye on as we go forward, beyond Nov. 8. It’s representative of the place that the political class has failed most and, conversely, is most indicative of a place that has been used as a messaging prop for far too long. Springfield could serve as the backdrop for every old-school political ad — that hard working blue collar guy, the teacher, the farmer silhouetted in a field of grain as the American flag comes into focus in the background. The (insert politician here, from the last 50 years) has promised to put them first. After all, they are the vaunted American middle class, the heartbeat of our society, the reason we all haven’t cashed in our chips and surrendered to the Redcoats. When (_____) gets to Washington, they’ll be first and last on the priority list.
How’s that turned out?
