Being in your thirties today means you have lived more or less half-and-half with Democratic and Republican presidencies, known twenty years of peace, and fifteen of war. It means you were grazing the boundaries of adulthood when we all experienced the sudden reversal of what some fashionable scholars had taken to calling the “End of History” after the close of the Cold War. That shock came my sophomore year, a crisp September day in Boston, as it was in Manhattan, when history thundered back into being. It wasn’t hard to tell by sundown that every thing would be different, that irony and apathy wouldn’t dominate our years after all, that our generation would go to war just as our parents’ and their parents’ did.
History was back, and in hindsight it’s obvious that we had actually never been living outside its rhythm. But in the horror of that sunny Tuesday, all we could make out was the onset of a major shift. I remember thinking that suddenly our generation’s project had been abruptly reassigned—that yesterday we had been absorbed in Clinton-era concerns around globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology, but now we were being plunged into a different realm, dominated by things like warfare and terrorism.
Today, it has come full circle; we see how often war and terrorism are driven by the dynamics of globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology. Like laws of physics, these forces were animating our affairs all along—which should have been no surprise to people from a place like South Bend, a city wrestling such forces long before economists and newspapers gave us terms like “globalization” and “Rust Belt.”
BY THE TIME MY PARENTS’ U-Haul appeared on College Street in May of 1980, little remained of South Bend’s industrial heyday but a widespread plague of empty factory buildings. I grew up among them, unable to fathom the tragedy encoded in their condition. From the back seat of the car on the way to Martin’s, I scarcely even asked about the enormous brick structure with the even taller white smokestack that we would pass after the turn onto Elwood Avenue. Ghostly, it presided over the junction where our residential area met the strip mall containing our go-to grocery store, along with Osco Drug, a Little Caesar’s, and a Laundromat. Only years later would I go around the back of that giant brick brewery to explore the parking lot, bounded by an ex-railroad with waist-high weeds poking up between the ties, and look up at the several stories of ruin, with one outer wall gone completely, exposing floors in naked cross-section like you’d see in footage of war zones, topped by inexplicable trees growing from somewhere on the fifth floor.
Why do I not recall talking to classmates about the acres of collapsing Studebaker factories we would pass on the way to school along Michigan Street? If I had grown up somewhere else and arrived to see this, I would have noticed little else. I don’t think it was taboo to speak of it. It was just unremarkable, since we’d grown up in its midst. We were used to it, it was part of the furniture.
Yet somehow none of this made it feel like a bad place for a child to grow up. The collapsing structures had their place in the larger texture of our neighborhoods, which also included well-kept parks and decent houses with lawns and hedges and flowers. We didn’t think of the empty factories as the scenery of a post-industrial bust town in the 1980s. We didn’t think of them at all. They were just there, a visual set, accompanied by the soundtrack of life in South Bend: crickets in the summer, crows in the fall, and all year long the echoing horns of trains rumbling through in the night on their way to Chicagoland.
AND IF THERE WAS RUIN in some corners of the city, there was majesty in others. There was the gleaming Golden Dome of the University of Notre Dame, the library with the mosaic mural of “Touchdown Jesus” overlooking the stadium, and the stadium itself, the “House that [Knute] Rockne Built,” which I vaguely understood to be a historic and hallowed place even before I understood what football was and what it meant around here. Its orange bricks, colored a little differently than most of the rest of campus, signaled something important. Fidgeting with my seat belt on days when Mom or Dad brought me along to campus, I could turn and gaze up at the mysterious structure, try to fathom the bizarre geometry of the underside of the concrete risers (“Dad, why is there an upside-down stairway?”), and sense that this place, neither civic nor religious, was somehow both.
Growing up in any place with a lost golden age, you absorb its legacy in fragments, hearing once-great names—Oliver, Morris, Bendix, Studebaker—without being able to match them to anything living. You take them in at first without comprehension, like the names of saints. Only as you grow older, with more education and context, do you begin to picture how such giants of industry must have thrown their weight around their city, and what it might have been like as our factory precincts heaved with tens of thousands of workers at a time.
A century ago, city boosters burst with pride as they celebrated and marketed South Bend. A 1901 book published by the South Bend Tribune begins:
South Bend! No inland city on the American continent has attained greater renown or displayed more fully those sterling virtues of modern manhood and human progress, than this beautiful city located on the banks of the magnificent and picturesque St. Joseph River.
A bit more factually, a 1919 Pictorial Souvenir of South Bend made a series of impressive assertions:
It is, of course, generally known that Studebaker’s plant is the largest vehicle factory in the world and that the Oliver Plow Company is the largest plow factory in the world, but it is not generally realized how many more of the city’s establishments are among the largest of their kind.
It goes on to document the fact that the Folding Paper Box Company had “the largest paper box factory in Indiana and one of the largest in the world,” and that the Birdsell Manufacturing Company housed the “largest makers of clover hullers in the world.” South Bend companies made brooms, cigars, spark arresters (whatever that is), gears, gloves, white ice, ice cream, mattresses, plows, stoves, rubber, shirts, tents, dowels, bicycles, and fishing tackle, among countless other products.
And, famously, there were the pocket watches. The South Bend Watch Company made products so precise that at trade shows they would freeze a watch in a big block of ice where you could see it still ticking faithfully inside. An old advertisement has an image of the watch in the ice, but for me the most remarkable thing in the ad is something else that strikes you as you read its big letters:
SOUTH BEND WATCH
FROZEN IN ICE, KEEPS PERFECT TIME
SOUTH BEND WATCH CO.
SOUTH BEND, IND.
How powerful the very name of our city must have been. All you had to do to sell watches—besides put one in a block of ice—was name them after our city. That was enough, by way of branding: the name “South Bend” was a byword for workmanship and precision.
I’m proud to own a couple, one of them a 1909 model, which still keeps pretty good time if you wind it up. The company made over a million watches, but failed to realize how much was at stake when rivals began marketing the “trench watch,” a World War I innovation that put watches on leather straps on men’s wrists. The company lumbered along as though nothing had changed, producing some of the best-known pocket watches of the early wristwatch age. Their failure to innovate was fatal; the firm did not survive the Crash of 1929.
The easy lesson to draw from this is that you must innovate to survive. But you could find a more nuanced moral of the story: that keeping up doesn’t always mean making something completely new. To survive, South Bend Watch wouldn’t have needed to start making radios or com puters. They just needed to adapt a good thing they already had, and refine their business. If they, and Studebaker, and some other companies, had managed to do this, I might have grown up in a different South Bend.