Several times, I had variations of this conversation. Another time, as I emptied my pockets at the metal detector in the lobby of our building, a resident said, “It was so great to see you on TV!” as if noting something unusual. It was an odd thing to say to a mayor who turns up on local television practically every day. But what he meant was that they had seen me—and our city—represented on national TV in the course of the DNC race, and he took pride in the publicity for our hometown.
In a sense, we had won by losing. I had influenced the national conversation about where our party needed to go, but also got to return home to the rewarding work of the mayor’s office, where compelling second-term projects awaited, from guiding a new route for the train to Chicago, to building out affordable housing options in low-income neighborhoods, to spearheading a transformation of our most recognizable parks. Meanwhile, Americans (at least those who closely followed a process like this) saw that there was more to the emerging leadership of our party than blue-state federal officials—and more to my Indiana home than intolerance or nostalgia. In the course of arguing that the party needed to better vindicate itself in the heartland, I also found myself telling our city’s story as a way to insist to the party and to the nation that the fundamental sentiment moving people in my corner of the industrial Midwest was not resentment, but hope.
19
Not “Again”
There is no going back.
South Bend cannot and should not rewind to the Studebaker heyday of the 1950s, just as America cannot restore the old order in which families obeyed a single, male head of household, each race had its so-called place, average weather was the same from one decade to the next, and a job was for life.
For those who remember if not mourn an epoch of lost greatness, it may be impossible to accept that there is no return. But for those of us who were raised only among its shards, and who grew up questioning if it was ever as great as advertised, embracing the permanence of change is the only thing that can liberate us to move forward.
I never did see those factories off Main Street and Indiana Avenue throbbing with activity, or the thousands of people who worked there pouring into Robertson’s Department Store on a Thursday evening for a family night out. If I had ever witnessed the Studebaker assembly building as a hive of production instead of as that silent hulk overshadowing our baseball park, maybe I would dream of nothing but restoring it to its original use and former glory. But for a generation that knew it only in its post-1963 decay, the building’s potential as a home for data centers and glass-walled tech company offices is more vivid and believable than any thought of a return to its automaking past.
True hope for our city never lay in returning to some nostalgic prior state, some literal or figurative return of Studebaker. Rather, the first vision of the resurgent South Bend in which we now live was expressed all the way back in that bleak December of 1963 when the store owner Paul Gilbert defiantly told the assembly of alarmed fellow city leaders, “This is not Studebaker, Indiana. This is South Bend, Indiana.” At the time, it might have sounded like wishful thinking. No doubt many in his audience, knowing how dependent our city was on that industry, exchanged skeptical glances at one another, supposing that he was in denial.
But the real denial, and the more costly, was to persist in believing that South Bend could only thrive as an old-school, automaking company town dependent on a single, massive employer. I would encounter this thinking even a half century later in 2011 when I was running for mayor. I heard it as a refrain among those who said that what we needed was to land that one mythic giant factory, to lure “something big” here from somewhere else, and get some version of Studebaker taking root again. This was the impossible promise that held us back—and, seeing this promise go unkept, my generation grew up suspecting that our only hope was to get out.
Progress could begin only once the loss had been fully metabolized. Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in “Make America Great Again.” Beneath the impossible promises—that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn’t even real—is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.
To defeat this temptation is to see what actually lies on the other side of acceptance: not diminished expectations, but still greater ones. For us, paradoxically, the only way to relive anything like our hometown’s former greatness is to stop trying to retrieve it from our vanished past. If manufacturing is to grow around here now, its growth will not come by reverting to a world of cut-off trade routes and pre-computer production methods. It will come from those of our employers who seek to compete in new ways—and from new arrivals, like the Silicon Valley–based start-up that bought the entire facility housing the old commercial Hummer production line where I sent Hillary Clinton a few years ago. Backed by investment from China, the company is making partially automated electric vehicles, using local union labor. Enterprises like this take globalization and automation as their point of departure, and work through these forces rather than against them. The founders of car manufacturing here would scarcely recognize this industry as their own—but it echoes their originality and audacity, showing that the less we concentrate on emulating our forebears, the more we begin to resemble them at their best.
I WOULD LOVE TO BE TRANSPORTED, for an evening, back in time to the South Bend of 1960, 1940, or even 1920. I would love to stroll the pavements of the past, and see Michigan Street fronted by an uninterrupted wall of active building fa?ades, rather than the urban missing teeth left by Nixon-era demolitions. I would see the pedestrian and vehicle bustle downtown that we have only now managed to create anew through the politically and fiscally expensive Smart Streets initiative. I could watch passengers step off an electric train from Chicago at a station that was foolishly moved out of downtown before I was born, and which we are still working to restore to the heart of the city. I would look at the most elegantly dressed gentlemen walking past and try to guess which among them was a senior executive at Bendix or South Bend Watch or one of the other towering companies of South Bend’s past. Then I would jump on a streetcar, along tram lines long since torn out, and let it carry me into the West Side, to step off in a neighborhood and wander into a bakery full of East European delights or a tavern where people were swilling Drewrys beer and speaking the language of the old country.