I knew right away where to send her. AM General, one of the largest employers in our community, had a great story to tell. Best known for producing Humvees for the military, it had also manufactured a number of commercial vehicles, including the well-known Hummer line and the MV-1, a new kind of vehicle for people with disabilities. Moreover, the company demonstrated how to keep with the times in ways that had escaped Studebaker. The company was in the midst of a three-year contract to manufacture Mercedes R-class vehicles, a luxury SUV sold exclusively in the Chinese market. Here was a brilliant example of how American workers could play a role, other than victim, in the globalized economy: right in our part of the industrial Midwest, we had American union auto workers building a German-branded vehicle shipped to customers in Asia. I made, as they say, a few phone calls.
Two days later I was in a folding chair on the factory floor, watching Secretary Clinton give her stump speech to the assembled auto workers and various chosen community members in attendance after a tour on the shop floor. It all went as it was supposed to, except for one oddity at the end, which amounts, in retrospect, to a major warning sign: polite applause. After Clinton spoke, everyone clapped in their seats. Then she shook hands along a rope line, and was off to the next event. This might sound normal, but I had been at enough campaign events over the years to know that a presidential campaign appearance this late in the game should never end with anything but people on their feet. At the time it just struck me as a little peculiar that a union-heavy and typically Democratic crowd was not standing to cheer; now, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like a sign of her campaign’s fatal lack of enthusiasm among workers in the industrial Midwest.
Other candidates had plenty of energy and motivation that spring, and they brought it with them to South Bend. On consecutive days in May, our Century Center downtown saw visits from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The venue was the same, but atmospheres around these two visits could not have been more different. Mingling with the folks in line around the Century Center parking lot to see Bernie, I felt like I was at a party, or maybe a rock concert. Attendees were clearly serious about their values, but had also come with a cheerful, even playful spirit. Walking up and down alongside the line to get in, hangers-on hawked FEEL THE BERN T-shirts and buttons picturing the hair and glasses, Bernie with the finch, Bernie riding a unicorn.
The next day’s Trump rally felt like a party, too, but one of those edgy parties where you’re not totally sure if a fight will break out. Bernie had drawn about forty-two hundred spectators to his event; the Trump crowd was over ten thousand. As the rallygoers waited all afternoon to get in, protesters lined up to face them across Saint Joseph Street (soon to be renamed for Dr. King). There had been enough cases of violence around other recent Trump rallies that I was worried. Our safety strategy was twofold. Publicly, I focused on calling the community to its highest values, telling a TV crew from WNDU: “We welcome anybody who’s here to express their free speech rights, even if we have vigorous disagreements. I expect the community to demonstrate our values of welcome and inclusion when it comes to responding to this campaign’s arrival.” Behind the scenes, I wanted to leave nothing to chance, and asked the police department to be as vigilant as possible without undercutting the freedom of attendees and protesters.
Police set up a temporary command post in a nearby building overlooking the area, tracking online threats of violence and eyeing the parking lot for trouble. Visiting both to thank the officers and gauge the temperature of our first responders, I passed a huddle of fully-geared-up SWAT officers, there just in case, and reflected on how suddenly times had changed. This was not what it had been like when Harry Truman’s whistle-stop tour came through, or Reagan or Obama, for that matter. For the first time in the modern life of South Bend, a mayor had to approach the arrival of a major presidential campaign in his city primarily through a sobering lens: not that of civic pride, or even partisan politics, but rather the possibility of political violence. Accustomed to sizing up presidential rallies for their political impact, I now had to approach this one mainly from the perspective of safety.
The rally itself was in keeping with most of the others; nothing happened that was particularly unusual by the standards of that spring. Trump was close to clinching the nomination, and his speech contained all of the greatest hits that he would repeat throughout the summer and fall. He promised to build a wall, and that Mexico would pay for it. He took jabs at his rivals, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz. He attacked free trade and globalization, and vowed to deliver the most successful presidency ever: “We’re going to win so much you’re going to beg me, Mr. President, please, please, it’s too much winning.”
As a mayor, my idea of winning that day simply consisted of getting through the afternoon without incident. Checking in periodically for signs of trouble, I was reassured by our police department that the rallygoers and protesters were keeping it peaceful, if passionate. The day’s last situation report from the police chief let me finally breathe a sigh of relief: “No injuries, no arrests.”
THE CLINTON AND TRUMP CAMPAIGNS swapped fortunes repeatedly, up and down, through the summer. The last few days were marked by uptight but sincere confidence on the part of the Hillary campaign, mixed with a widespread sense that she was nowhere near as strong as she should be. The County-City Building is an early vote site, and as I crossed the lobby on my way to the office each morning in those last few days before the election, I wondered if this would be a close one even in our county. With its strong blue-collar tradition, St. Joseph County is normally one of the most Democratic in a mostly Republican state. But when Election Day came, she won our county only by a hair—a sign of major underperformance overall.
In the elevator the next day, I greeted my colleague Christina Brooks, and saw her face wet with tears. When we got to my floor, the staff looked bewildered. I called a staff meeting, telling everyone around the table that the most important element of our job had just become more difficult and more pressing: to hold the community together. Christina then described the experience of trying to reassure her daughter that it would be safe to go to school that morning. When her daughter showed her KKK-themed social media memes that her classmates were sending her that night while joking about Trump’s victory, she thought of her own upbringing as an African-American woman and realized it wasn’t just her daughter she was trying to reassure—it was herself. Another colleague, Cherri Peate, said she feared for her brother, simply because he was a tall young black man. Was he in more danger now? And also, exactly what was it this new president was promising our country? “Make America Great Again”? she asked, looking around the room as if any of us could make it less threatening for her. “When was America ever great for us?”
Later that day, I went to meet with the College Democrats chapter at Notre Dame. Some of them were also tearful, and for many of them, this was personal. Grace, the student co-president who was a survivor and an outspoken advocate on campus sexual assault, described the effect this was having on students in a similar situation. She had gone, concerned, to check on one student she knew who was struggling with the ways the election had compounded the trauma of her own assault—and found her suicidal.
LIFE WENT ON, BUT IT BEGAN to be punctuated by interventions from national politics of a kind I had not seen before. One day, my phone started to blow up with texts asking if there was any truth to rumors of an ICE raid on the West Side. I asked around to see if there was something going on. There wasn’t, but by the time I knew that for sure, several of the small businesses in the Latino-heavy West Side of our city had shut down for the day, and families were taking refuge in St. Adalbert’s Church.