On this page you’ll find notes arising from American Futures project that Deborah and James Fallows have had underway, with some appearances on Marketplace radio, since 2013. Their full archive is here.
Downtown Eastport, from above. The large square waterfront structure on the left, long abandoned, is the site of the new development just announced. The smaller square waterfront structure three buildings over to the right, between the piers, is The Commons of Eastport, where we rented rooms to stay on our visits. The low building next to the Commons, with a white front and red roof, is the locally famous Waco Diner.Aerial photo copyright Don Dunbar
Since our first visit in the fall of 2013, Deb and I have reported frequently on the grit, vision, resilience, and apparently indomitable drive of the roughly 1300 people who live in the little city of Eastport, Maine. For reference, I did a 2014 magazine story on Eastport called “The Little Town That Might”; we did a visit and report with Marketplace radio around the same time; Deb and I, with John Tierney, did a long series of web posts, all collected here; and this past fall Deb and I returned for an update on some of the buffets Eastport had suffered from shifts in the political and economic landscape many thousands of miles away from their Down East locale. For instance: warfare in Syria had disrupted the port business in Maine, through a causal chain explained here. And the collapse of a breakwater badly affected the cruise ship and tourism industries on which the town was placing many hopes.
This past week Eastport got a much-needed dose of very good news. The Arnold Development group of Kansas City specializes in the kind of walkable, environmentally sustainable, mixed-use and downtown-residential developments that make a huge difference in making cities feel “livable.” And this month Arnold has announced an $18 million undertaking, with partners in Eastport, to renovate the most imposing structure in the city’s downtown.
Classic roll-top sardine can (Wikimedia)
This is the now-derelict works of what was once the Seacoast Canning Company, a factory that produced tin cans during Eastport’s early 20th-century heyday as a world capital of the sardine industry. Ever seen old pictures of roll-top sardine tins? This building is where millions of them came from.
Back in 2005, three of the Eastport leaders we’ve written about frequently—Nancy Asante, Linda Godfrey, and Meg McGarvey, working together as Dirigamus LLC—bought the old factory, which had fallen into disuse, and began developing plans for its redevelopment as a downtown center for retail, entertainment, office-space, and other purposes. [Dirigamus is of course Latin for “we lead.” Maine’s state motto is Dirigo, “I lead.”] Nearly four years ago the Bangor Daily Newsran a story about their ambitions, obstacles, and progress. Deb and I have heard off and on about the project since about that time. Thus this past week we were delighted to hear through the Maine media that the deal had come through.
Eastport’s own Quoddy Tides was first with the news. Today the Bangor Daily News has a story on details of the deal. Another account is in Mainebiz. The redeveloped site will be called 15 Sea Street; a fuller description of the ambitions behind it is here.
The can factory recently (courtesy Bob Godfrey)
And the future plans:
Concept drawings by Peter MacKenzie, of Comeau MacKenzie Architecture in Saint John, New Brunswick. (The branch of my forebears who were the Mackenzies of Nova Scotia avoided the showy capital K.)
From Arnold Development’s site:
Arnold Development Group’s model of their general approach to development, rather than for specific plans in Eastport. (Arnold Development)
Of course plans aren’t realities; there’s a long road ahead; and [whatever other cautionary note you’d like to add]. But completing this deal is a major achievement, and we’ve learned never to underestimate any of the people who have committed themselves to Eastport’s rebirth.
Montgomery County traffic, Cirrus Four-Three-Five Sierra Romeo taking Runway One-Four, VFR (visual flight rules) departure to the west, Montgomery.
Rolling down Runway 14 for takeoff from Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland. (Deborah Fallows)
And with that, we were off in our small Cirrus airplane for the last official journey of our American Futures series for The Atlantic, flying away from frigid Washington D.C. and its political turmoil, on a southerly route to California.
We have flown over 60,000 miles during the past three-and-a-half years, from the upper Midwest to Maine, south through New England and the Mid Atlantic states to Georgia and Florida, sweeping through the deep south, to Texas and the southwest, up the central valley of California to Oregon and Washington, and closing the loop to Montana, all the while snaking in and out of the so-called flyover country, the middle of everywhere through Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and much of the rest.
Map of the first few legs of our travel, as shown last year in Jim’s cover story.
“Flyover” to us has meant landing in dozens of towns for jam-packed visits of a week or two, often returning for unfinished business, reporting, or nostalgia. The purpose of this last journey is a little different. Our destination is sunny, warm, mind-clearing and political soul-cleansing inland southern California, to Jim’s hometown of Redlands. We plan to ponder all we’ve seen and try to make some sense of it on a more composed canvas than the pointillist collection of hundreds of blog posts that we have written along the way.
From experience, we anticipated that the journey would be unpredictable and exciting. Flight in a small plane is always that way: you don’t know which surprising event will occur, but you can always be sure that one or more will—sometimes good, sometimes bad. We are never disappointed, and always surprised anew by the dramas airborne, by the perspectives on the unfolding country below, and by the snapshots of life on the ground in places we land, many of which we’d never been to or even sometime heard of before being steered there for one reason or another.
Our leave-taking was not auspicious. Our planned departure for Sunday, and then for Monday came and went: the weather was too bad. We were heeding our only cardinal rule, which is that weather comes first, and there is no place we really have to be, ever. Cold, wind, snow, and icy conditions gave us a few more days to organize at home and winnow the next 6 months’ belongings—clothes, flight gear, portable technology, emergency supplies—into the 140 pounds the plane could carry, besides us and a reasonable amount of gas.
Ready to go at KGAI. Brrrrrrr. The yellow cord is the electric engine-heater that had been plugged in through the previous frigid days, allowing the plane to start. It’s wrapped around the propeller to reduce the chances of forgetting to disconnect it before starting up. Around the plane are the 140 pounds’ worth of clothes, notes, machinery, and other possessions the plane could handle for its long trip. (Photo by Uber driver)
Finally, Tuesday looked like the day. It was still a blustery 29 degrees in Washington D.C., up from the teens two days before. But the clouds were high, so we could fly below them without having to file an “instrument rules” flight plan or worry about icing on the wings. (If you’re in the clouds in wintertime, you’re probably going to be in icing conditions, which are dangerous and have to be avoided.) We bundled into clothing layers so thick that I had to loosen my seat belt, a complex system of straps not unlike in toddlers’ carseats. I stretched my headset to fit over a heavy knit cap. Jim unplugged the plane’s engine from its overnight warming station. After all that, the sound of the motor turning over quickly, and I would add proudly, was our signal.
Heading south over the Potomac River (Deborah Fallows)
The air traffic controllers, (ATC), my heroes of the sky, guided us through the busy Dulles airspace, on a shortcut south. We expected headwinds, but not the strong 40 to 50 knots direct headwind blasts that slowed our ground speed from our accustomed 170 knots (about 200 mph) down to measly 109 at times. I was grateful for my natural sea legs, dating back to a childhood of pounding over waves in small sailboats, which translated well to the bumps and blips from gusty winds aloft. This part of the journey wasn’t for the faint of heart or stomach.
Inching slowly over snowy Virginia (Deborah Fallows)
Inching over Virginia, we began to wean ourselves off the frenetic breathlessness of political news that saturated our hometown by listening to the slow-paced Senate committee hearings for some administration nominees on our Sirius XM radio.
View from my right seat, as we were guided in for refueling in Spartanburg (Deborah Fallows)
We stopped for cheap gas in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Just beyond that, the snow had melted and given way to long stretches of brown earth. We tried out a few different altitudes before settling as low as we could, around 2500 feet, where headwinds were a bit lighter. (Usually the lower the altitude, the weaker the wind.) Outside, the temperatures began rising. We flew over the catfish farms and the erratic geometry of forest-clearing.
We were chasing the 5:06 PM sunset in Demopolis, Alabama, our hoped-for destination, to get in before dark and before the 5:00 PM scheduled closing time for the small airport office, called the FBO, or Fixed Base Operator in general aviation terms. We chose Demopolis for nostalgia this time, as Jim had spent a good part of the summer of 1968 around Selma, Montgomery, and Demopolis, as a teenaged very cub-reporter for a civil rights newspaper called the Southern Courier, writing about voter registration and other civil rights efforts. We wanted to give the town a look nearly 50 years later.
Chasing the sunset to Demopolis, Alabama (Deborah Fallows)
About ten minutes out, at just before 5 o’clock, Jim made radio contact with the FBO. Jason, the manager there, told us no rush to beat the 5:00 PM deadline, that he would stick around. That was welcome news to me; as part of my self-designated ground support, I usually arranged a motel and transportation before we arrived, a lesson learned over the years after some unhappy after-hours arrivals at rural airports, with no way into town and no place to stay. This time, our plans had been too unsure to make any bookings.
But we were lucky. At the end of a long departure and a very long day, it all worked out. With generosity exceeding even Southern hospitality, Jason lent us his own car for the night, saying his wife could come collect him later. We got the last room at the Best Western, which was booked with a team of workers who had come into town to service the planned outage of the cement factory. We were well on our way.
Over SoCal on a recent trip. We're headed there again soon.Deborah Fallows
For me this is the thirdpost of the day, and probably the last in this space for quite a while.
Effective today, I’m beginning a five-month book-writing leave from online and print activities for TheAtlantic. At the start of June I plan to be back, recharged for the fray, and by then my wife Deb and I should—will!—have finished a book on the America we’ve seen in our travels across the country these past four years, and what that means for the years ahead.
Some practical notes:
A major satisfaction in writing in this space and its precursors since the mid-1990s has been engagement with readers. But by the final few chaotic months of this year’s campaign, I had given up even pretending to answer reader emails (or any emails), or sorting them for reader-comment posts. There are still hundreds I would like to have quoted but have not managed to use. I will soon forward some of those, and anything that arrives in coming weeks, to the impresario of our Notes section, Chris Bodenner, who has skillfully curated reader discussions. And not for the first time I’ll be considering the “email bankruptcy” option.
The last time I took a blogging leave was five years ago, when Deb and I moved back to China for me to finish my book China Airborne. (Her wonderful Dreaming in Chinese had just come out.) Back then, the concept of “blogging” still existed—that is, of frequent, incremental, voicey dispatches on a range of personalized topics—and I had the joy of assembling a stellar cast of guest bloggers to fill in. Really, it was an incredible group: check them out here. Times have changed, and there is no longer a set personal-blog space here for guests to fill. Our site keeps evolving, and I’m not sure what it will offer by the middle of this year. But for now you will just have to make do with the dozens of other items TheAtlantic serves up each day.
Why a cold-turkey break? For an external reason, and an internal one.
The external reason involves the new reality of the Donald Trump era. During the final six months of his campaign, I tried to keep up with the “norm-breaking,” unprecedented things the candidate kept doing and saying. That became a nearly full-time activity, and the number of entries ultimately reached 152. Since the election, the pace of Trump’s transgressions and aberrations has only increased. As a reporter you can keep up with this, in the full intensity it deserves, or you can do anything else. I am 100% on board in supporting the reporters, editors, and analysts at TheAtlantic and elsewhere who are girding for daily engagement with the implications of Trump. But I think that the greatest journalistic value I can add is not by spending all my time as one more voice in the fact-check/ norm-defense patrol but instead in reporting on how the rest of the country can and should respond. And I know that the latter is the story I am more excited to tell.
This leads to the other, internal reason, which involves my personal journalistic metronome. Through my long career with TheAtlantic I’ve had a sequence of shifts in topic and location. Through the early 1980s, I was heavily involved in debates about the military and budgetary policies of the incoming Ronald Reagan administration, including with my book National Defense. After five years of this, my family moved to Asia, to spend the late Reagan and early GHW Bush years viewing the U.S. from outside (and for me to do my books More Like Us and Looking at the Sun). I’ll skip ahead several topics and moves to the early 2000s, when I was back in Washington and heavily involved in debates about responding to the 9/11 attacks and invading Iraq (don’t do it!). After four-plus years of that, and reporting on the aftermath, in 2006 my wife and I moved to China, to spend the late GW Bush and early Obama eras seeing that country and viewing the U.S. from its perspective.
This time, I’ve done what I can through the past year to lay out the consequences of this year’s presidential choice. Those consequences are now upon us. As with every other major shift in national direction, the resulting story needs to be told at many levels. The version of the story I’m most passionate about telling, and that I believe is least likely to tell itself otherwise, involves the implications of what we’ve seen in dozens of places like San Bernardino and Sioux Falls and Erie and Allentown and Ajo and Greenville and Columbus and Charleston and Dodge City and Duluth.
The good and the bad of being in Washington is that what happens in national politics is right in front of you, unavoidably in your face all day long. The good part is why we’ve lived here for half of the past 40 years. The bad part is why we’ve lived elsewhere during the other half, in several-year installments.
These next few months will be an “other half” period. We’ll be based in inland Southern California, in Redlands, for the writing-camp period. And I’m undertaking a variety of additional “mind in the right place”/attention-protective moves, from reading more things on paper to being less exposed to cable TV. Related: The more time passes, the more I find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan’s famed essay on this topic. The public’s attention really has been treated as a free good in the tech-distraction era. We need to fight to protect it. Or at least I do.
Might there be an exception to the online sabbatical? Anything is possible. Suppose Xi Jinping were to announce that he’s personally taking up small-plane aviation, in a speech that begins “I often think of the example of the boiling frog” and ends “may God Bless the United States of America!” (which would be quite a speech), all while holding a leafblower in one hand and a craft beer in the other. I’d probably have to say something.
Online life changes and moves on, even more quickly than life in general. There are inevitable costs to stepping away. But in this case I believe there are greater benefits. See you in June.
Barn at the Deerwood Ranch wild horse refugee, outside Laramie, Wyoming this past November.James Fallows
This is the first of three posts on this New Year’s Day, building toward a change in (my part of) this space for the next few months.
First installment: quick updates on a few places and projects that my wife Deb and I have learned about in our American Futures travels these past few years.
Pittsburgh, Pa. The wonderful City of Asylum community, which Deb wrote about online here and which I described briefly in my cover story in March, has just won a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Congratulations! It’s an important and much-deserved recognition.
San Bernardino, Ca. Long before it was featured in global news because of the terror-related mass shooting a year ago, San Bernardino had struggled with one economic and political blow after another, as we reported here and here. The most dramatic downward step happened in the 1990s, when the enormous Norton Air Force Base, dominant employer when I was growing up in the area and long a bulwark of the regional economy, was closed for good.
This past month the San Bernardino Sunreported on a study showing that all the job loss from that closure has finally been recovered, and that the shift — largely to logistics operations for the likes of Amazon, the Stater Brothers grocery chain, and Kohl’s — has on a spending-power basis offset the loss of the base. The former Norton property is now San Bernardino International airport, SBD, which has itself become a major employer. I wrote about SBD several times, for instance here, when our propeller airplane was based at its Luxivair facility during our 2015 California travels; we’re headed there again soon. Through this past shopping-and-shipping season the San Bernardino airport won a major new UPS contract. The city of San Bernardino is now looking toward its post-civic-bankruptcy future, as Ryan Hagen of the Sun describes here. Good luck to a town that deserves much more of it.
Fresno and Clovis, Ca. I’ve talked about Fresno’s economic, cultural, technological, and downtown renovations in an endless series of posts; Deb has described schools there and in neighboring Clovis. Here’s a report on a big new environmental victory for Clovis; here’s a time-lapse video cam of the ambitious reconstruction work underway on Fresno’s downtown Fulton Street Mall; here are a few of the ever-expanding civic and tech activities of the training and incubator company Bitwise (including, topically for now, a seminar on how to avoid conflict and actually persuade in an era of polarized views); and here is the latest brewpub to announce its opening in Fresno’s reviving downtown. Happy New Year to all.
Eastport, Me. This fall the Boston Globehad a report on some of the plans, achievements, and frustrations we’ve been describing over the years in the little Down East city of Eastport, Maine. Now the Christian Science Monitoradds to the discussion of how climate shifts are affecting life in this part of the world.
Louisville, Ky. Back in June I reported on the exciting FirstBuild maker / prototyping / incubator facility in Louisville. Had the campaign (and China) not consumed so much of my life in the following months, I would have already said more about the stream of new products continuing to come onto the market from FirstBuild. During my visit I was intrigued by its Prisma cold-brew coffee maker, then still in early prototyping. The whole idea of the FirstBuild operation is to enable more Americans to make (and then sell) technically innovative, commercially viable, manufactured products. You can read about a range of the offerings, most based on crowdsourced pre-orders and funding, on FirstBuild’s blog and their Facebook page.
I’ve got a dozen more items on the update list, but these will have to do for now. There’s a lot happening inside the country. Happy New Year to everyone busily making America greater.
When you are an American living overseas, Thanksgiving is an even more powerful nationally unifying holiday than the Fourth of July. All the Americans know something special is going on; for everyone else, it’s just another Thursday. Even for non-Americans who are aware of the concept, the shifting date means they can’t quite keep it in mind, as they can with July 4. So the overseas bands of Yanks figure out where they can scrounge up our national-cuisine oddities like actual turkeys (usually we made do with great big chickens in Malaysia, and once a duck in China), cranberries, filling for pumpkin and pecan pies, etc. Even the tiny marshmallows to go with sweet potatoes. Then the American expats gather at someone’s home in the evening. Back in the days of VCRs, we would play a tape of some old football game for atmosphere.
This is on my mind because this is the first Thanksgiving that I will technically miss, for dateline reasons. I’ll get on a plane when it’s still Wednesday night in the U.S., and get off on the other side of the Pacific when Thursday is almost done. It’s a brief out-and-back trip and a long story, but “2016: The Year Without Thanksgiving” is an uncomfortably close match for my mood.
Nonetheless! As time allows in the coming days and weeks, I’ll put up some brief Thanksgiving-toned items about regrowth, recovery, resistance, reform, renovation, renaissance, and overall re-themed efforts at the local level. Let me start with this one now, which involves one of the towns that epitomized the mainly white, economically beset, distressed-manufacturing zones that were Donald Trump’s mainstay. This is our frequent haunt of Erie, Pennsylvania, long a Democratic stronghold that this time went narrowly for Trump. But even as the votes were being counted, the city had some good news.
The Erie area’s most important employer is no longer GE, which for years has been shedding jobs from its huge locomotive factory. Instead, it is Erie Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that was founded in the city in the 1920s and is still run with a very strong local-patriot sense. During election week it announced a $135 million new building project in the heart of Erie’s downtown, where its main campus is already located. This complements other downtown efforts, like the one I described earlier this fall.
In October, before this news came out, I asked Erie Insurance’s longtime chairman, Thomas Hagen, and its current CEO, Timothy NeCastro, why they had kept their growing business in this relatively remote location. “Our goal has been to do good things for our customers, and also for this community,” NeCastro said. Yes, sure, anyone could and would say that. But both Hagen and NeCastro went on to argue, as NeCastro put it, “we make plenty of money doing things according to our values. By setting out to do what we think is right for the customers, and this community, we find that we generate enough profits.”
I’ll have more to say about this very interesting company, which is run on the “reciprocal exchange” model that also applies to USAA and Farmers; Erie is No. 3 in size after those two. (In crude terms, you could think of this as an insurance-world counterpart to the Vanguard model of brokerage.) For me, what’s interesting about the company involves the way it has managed to run its national-scale operations and international talent-searches from its northwest Pennsylvania outpost, and how it imagines its long-term fortunes being connected to the town’s. That’s later; for our pre-Thanksgiving purposes, here is news of the expansion and background on the company’s evolution.
Also in local good news, I’ve mentioned the stark axis of generational differences in outlook in Erie. People in their 50s and 60s and above expected to work at the big factories, and bitterly feel the loss of those jobs. People in their 20s and 30s came of age when the factories were already on the way out, and they’re very prominent in the startup, advanced-manufacturing, and civic-engagement scene in Erie.
Last week one of the people we talked with several times in Erie announced his candidacy for mayor: That is Jay Breneman, a 34-year-old combat veteran of Iraq who is now on the county council. Obviously the choice about future leadership is one for Erie’s own people to make. My point is that the generational shift already evident in educational, technological, and non-profit parts of the community is extending to public life too. (And as Breneman and others are well aware, perhaps the most urgent task the city faces doesn’t involve crumbling factories at all. Instead it is the unjust state funding system that penalizes Erie’s schools. Pat Howard, opinion editor of the Erie Times-News, made the case very bluntly this past weekend. We’ll have more on this too, “soon.” )
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Want a few more teaser items on a pre-Thanksgiving list? Well, here is the latest report from the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, on the dispersal of startups around the country, and an accompanying video. And here’s Steve Case to similar effect. And here’s something related from AutoDesk. And this from our friends in Fresno.
But that’s enough for now. I’ll squeeze my thankfulness into the few hours of Thursday remaining when I get off the plane.
I mentioned yesterday that several local initiatives could mean as much to their communities or states as the outcome of most national races. The two historical examples I naturally think of are from California, Propositions 13 and 187. Prop 13, which was passed nearly 40 years ago, strictly capped property taxes—and in so doing helped shift California’s public schools from among the best-funded in the country, as they were in my school days, to among the worst.
Proposition 187, which was passed in 1994, limited public services for illegal/undocumented immigrants. It was a Republican-backed measure, championed by then-governor Pete Wilson, and was very unpopular with Latinos. You can’t prove exact cause and effect, but there’s no denying this change: In the decades leading up to Prop 187, the California of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan was a reliably Republican state in presidential elections. Since then, coincident with its growing Latino population, California has been the Democrats’ most important bulwark. (In the 11 presidential elections from 1948 to 1992, Harry Truman through Bill Clinton, California went Democratic only twice. In every election since then the Democrat has won, with margins that keep going up.)
Two of the measures I mentioned yesterday were city-wide. One is San Bernardino’s long-overdue reform of its dysfunctional city charter, via Measure L on today’s ballot. The other is Stockton’s attempt, through its Measure M, to approve a very small (quarter-cent) sales tax increase to fund libraries and recreation centers for young people and families who now badly lack them.
Stockton, once a site of commercial and industrial wealth, has become one of California’s poorer cities. Many of its people are immigrants; the population mix is roughly “40/30/20/10,” or roughly 40% Latino, 30% white, 20% Asian, and 10% black. “We’re the most diverse medium-sized city in America,” Mas’ood Cajee, a Stockton dentist who is one of the leaders of the Yes on M movement, told me yesterday.
Many of these children start out with varied disadvantages: of family income, language, unsafe neighborhoods, underfunded schools. Through the past decade, as Stockton was hit like other inland-California cities by the sub-prime real-estate crisis and then by its municipal bankruptcy, funding for almost everything has been cut. That’s why I find it impressive that the city council voted unanimously to fund libraries and rec centers again, and that most local civic groups have supported it. I hope the voters agree today.
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Why do I care about this? Partly because civic governance is at the moment more encouraging than national politics. And partly because Deb and I have seen other cities go through a similar process, with positive results.
Consider the example of Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge City and its environs in western Kansas are politically and culturally much more conservative than even inland parts of California. But their ethnic situation is similar—as we’ve discussed before, the meatpacking centers of Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal have become majority-Latino—and they also have faced civic challenges.
Dodge City’s answer, nearly twenty years ago, was something called the “Why Not Dodge” initiative. In 1997 the city’s voters approved a permanent sales-tax increase totaling one percent, with the proceeds to be used for long-term civic improvements. Now nearly everywhere you look in town, there’s another project funded by the ongoing flow of Why Not Dodge revenues. They include: a large public soccer complex; the Cavalier and Legends Park baseball and softball fields; an auto raceway; a new civic center; a large expo site; a brand new aquatics park, the Long Branch Lagoon, which was in very heavy use during our visits last summer; repairs on a historic railroad depot; and more.
In effect, a very conservative community voted itself an open-ended tax to pay for long-term infrastructure improvement. Why was this possible there, when its counterparts at the national level are gridlocked out of consideration?
“We may be ‘conservative.’ but we’re progressive,” Melissa McCoy, who grew up not far from Dodge City and is now the city’s Project Development Coordinator, told me. “There was a time when we had a really negative self-image as a town. But people thought, If we won’t invest in ourselves, how can we expect anybody else to? It was a matter of getting the community behind it and realizing that we needed to back ourselves up to get outside investment and support. Now we’re starting to see it pay off.”
I asked Joyce Warshaw, an elementary school principal who is Dodge City’s mayor, whether there was any mystery or contradiction in a politically conservative community enacting a permanent infrastructure-improvement tax. Warshaw is herself a Republican, who ran (but lost) in the GOP primary for the Kansas state senate this year.
“Not at all,” she said. “It’s been so beneficial for the city. This community is incredible in embracing things that need to happen for the city. I think many people saw how important it was to raise taxes just a minute little bit to raise our quality of life here in Dodge.” And to anticipate a question from those who haven’t been there: cities in this part of Kansas cannot define themselves in narrow ethnic-enclave terms. The railroad and cattle businesses have historically brought a range of people to western Kansas, and Dodge City is now majority Latino. (As Deb and I have discussed here, here, and here.)
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We’re nearing poll-closing time here on the East Coast, and I won’t pause now to untangle the ways in which local-area communitarian impulses do and do not convey to the national level. That’s for later, at greater length.
The point for now, on election day, is to note that the work of investment and civic improvement still happens in the country; it just doesn’t seem that way, since national politics have been so discouraging. In this spirit, I hope that San Bernardino’s voters approve Measure L, to put their city on a better course; that the necessary super-majority of two-thirds of Stockton’s voters approve Measure M; that statewide voters defeat Proposition 53, which would hamstring big statewide investments; and that Dodge City’s investments continue to pay off.
As I head back to vote-watching, here is one more photo from Robert Dawson’s extraordinary series “Raising Literacy: A Photographic Survey of Libraries and Literacy in Stockton and San Joaquin County.” Dawson and Ellen Manchester have documented the role of libraries around the country and the world, including in his book The Public Library: An American Commons.
Richard Soto in his Spanish-language library. Diptych by Richard Dawson, from “Raising Literacy”
Another gigantic turbine blade is delivered in Spearville, KansasNicolas Pollock / The Atlantic
At its peak, nearly one century ago in 1920, the coal-mining industry employed nearly 800,000 people in the United States. Decade by decade, as America’s population has swelled and its economy has grown, and as total coal output as also increased, employment in coal mines has steadily fallen. (The one exception was in the late 1970s, immediately after the first “oil shocks,” when the number of miners rose from about 195,000 to about 230,000. By 1985, it was back down to 170,000.)
Presidential administrations come and go; energy and environmental policies change; but the one-way pressure of technology is such that the barely 80,000 people who now work in U.S. mines produce vastly more coal than 800,000 did a century ago. It’s no “war on coal.” It’s what has happened in the world since the dawn of the industrial age.
But of course the plight of the coal industry, which is all too real for the people affected, comes up frequently in political and economic discussions—compared with, say, the situation of dental hygienists, of whom there are more than twice as many as coal miners. Or of bus drivers, of whom there are nearly ten times as many.
Or, crucially, of those employed in the energy industries that come after coal: solar, wind, tidal and geothermal, and other renewable sources. Employment there is growing much faster than it’s shrinking in coal, yet somehow this is barely part of our political or state-of-America awareness. Employment in solar alone nearly doubled in just three years, from around 120,000 in 2012 to around 240,000 in 2015. That’s three times as many solar-industry employees as coal miners, but they have at best one-third the mind-share in media and politics.
This is understandable: what’s familiar, and fading, is easier to recognize than what’s new and just taking form. But it does distort the way Americans think (and feel) about so many things, starting with the overall balance between decline and renewal in the country.
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Wind turbine display in western Kansas (Nic Pollock / The Atlantic)
This is the set-up for the next video in TheAtlantic’s election-season American Futures coverage. This one is from our familiar and favored stomping grounds of Erie, Pennsylvania; Fresno and environs in California; and Dodge City and neighboring Spearville in western Kansas.
In a different way in each of these different parts of the country, renewable energy is serving as the source for new companies and increased jobs. I think you will find this interesting:
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For convenient one-stop shopping, here are previous videos in the series. This one is about the way immigrants and refugees are becoming part of existing communities, even in today’s direct political atmosphere.
And here is one about the generational divide in the hope/despair balance in many of the communities that have suffered from large-scale, long-term economic dislocations.
And while I’m at it, a related one from the “Golden Triangle” of Mississippi:
Thanks to Nic Pollock and the entire intrepid video team for telling this part of the modern American story.
A view of Eastport, with the old sardine cannery, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, a former bank, a new restaurant, and more. (Courtesy of Tides Institute and Museum of Art)
The Boston Globehad a story over the weekend about the never-say-die small city of Eastport, Maine. As we’ve been chronicling online for the past few years, and in this magazine story in early 2014, Eastport balances the difficulties and the opportunities of its unusual location, at the northeastern extreme of Down East Maine across a strait from Campobello Island in Canada.
Difficulty: it is so far from anyplace else. It’s two-plus hours by car from Bangor, four-plus from Portland. Opportunity: its distant setting is so pristine and beautiful, and so close to both the tidal-power potential of the Bay of Fundy and the touristic and marine-economy potential of the sea.
Difficulty: it has so few people, roughly 1,300, who are poorer-and-older than average even for a state that is overall poor and that has the highest median age of all states. Opportunity: so many of these few people have been so inventive in exploring arts-related, advanced-tech, recreational, environmental, and other possible futures for their town.
Downtown Eastport, with the collapsed breakwater visible on the right; this is looking from The Commons building at the center of town (James Fallows / The Atlantic)
The Globe follows up on a twist in the Eastport economy I reported in early September: the way the ramifications of the warfare in Syria had reached even this seemingly insulated locale, plus how the bad luck of a collapsing breakfront has complicated the city’s efforts. Worth reading, for the combination of hardship and hope, and also for the very good photos and graphic illustration of the pregnant-cow trade.
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As part of the Eastport story, it’s also worth checking out this piece by Deb in early September, about the surprisingly ambitious and large-scale arts scene in a little town. Among other characters you’ll meet Jenie Smith, the nephrologist who doubles as a coffee-bar owner (and whom we first saw as stage manager at the local playhouse, at a production of The Glass Menagerie). She provides a nice closing quote in the Globe piece. Also Richelle Gribelle, shown below, part of the artist-in-residence program in town.
Richelle Gribelle, of California, during her time as artist-in-residence in Eastport this fall (James Fallows)
Continued good luck and better fortune to the local patriots of Eastport, especially now as another winter comes on.
Sisters originally from Darfur, resettled in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The young lady on the left was a proud member of public high school ROTC.Deborah Fallows / the Atlantic
Deb Fallows has a new post up, about what’s actually involved in settling immigrants from Syria—or Somalia or Congo or Bhutan—in the American cities that have taken the lead in doing so. It’s based on our reporting in Sioux Falls, Burlington, Erie, Fresno, Dodge City, and elsewhere. I encourage you to read it on general principles, and for these additional reasons:
1. More and more an axis in this campaign, and in the ongoing struggles to define what comes next for America, is a disagreement over whether America is better as a more racially and culturally diverse society, or as one that is more “traditional” homogeneous society.
Compared with most other developed societies, Americans are more pro-diversity. That is what a major Pew global survey found this year:
But within the United States, Democrats/Clinton supporters are dramatically more comfortable with this kind of change than Republicans and Trump supporters. From another Pew survey:
If you’d like to see those differences playing themselves out, I invite you to check out (warily) the comments section of Deb’s latest post, in which some people lambaste the menace of outsiders and others welcome them.
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2. Our experience around the country has been that the more people are exposed to immigrants and refugees, the less panicked they are about them. I won’t try to give you a referenced-and-linked proof of that right now, though I will give a link to this video. I will say that it’s a powerful, consistent impression—and that, for instance, you’ll hear Donald Trump get lustier cheers for “Build that wall!” in New Hampshire or Iowa than you will in Texas or California.
I will also recommend this recent piece in the NYT from Garden City, Kansas, where we have also spent time. It’s about the recent white-nationalist plot to attack Somali refugees and immigrants there. Its theme, similar to what we have seen, was that the community itself was incorporating its new members, but people from elsewhere decided to deal with this alien “threat.”
(For the record, and for later discussion: Somalis and Sudanese are more obvious outsiders in western Kansas than the Mexican and other Latino immigrants who have been there for generations. The Somalis and Sudanese are more likely to arrive as unattached young men, rather than in families. They have much less of an established community to join. They are mainly Muslim, and thus more religiously foreign than the mainly Catholic Latino immigrants. The linguistic and cultural gap is wider. Still: it wasn’t people in Garden City itself who decided to plot against them.)
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3. The former Wall Street figure, now photographer and writer (including for The Atlantic)Chris Arnade has been doing a series of travels across the country that are a kind of sine-wave complement to what Deb and I have been doing. He has been dramatizing the people harmed and left out by economic polarization; we’ve been aware of them but also talking about the people trying to find a way forward. These are two parts of a complex modern whole. Our views on the immigration front are more directly congruent than on some other topics. You can read about it in a tweet series by him, starting here.
Short version: we’re all saying that if you want to feel more encouraged about the possibilities in this country, do what has been true in most eras of our history: talk with people who have fought to make this the arena for their family’s futures.
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4. Deb and I will be discussing these issues and others tomorrow morning, October 30, live from 8:30am ET to 9:15 on C-Span’s Washington Journal, with Steve Scully (who himself is from Erie). We’ll be on at the same time as the Marine Corps Marathon, which I used to run in back in its early days, and just before the Redskins-Bengals game from London.
Ann Coulter, whose views of America’s future and of immigration are … somewhat different, will also be on tomorrow, but not at the same time.
The interior of America was exciting for Albert Bierstadt and the imaginative landscape painters of the 19th century. It's newly exciting, in a different way, now. ('Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains,' Albert Bierstadt, 1868, Smithsonian Institute, via Wikimedia)
1) Meet the Press podcast. Yesterday afternoon I spoke with Chuck Todd for his podcast; the segment has gone up today, and you can find it here on Soundcloud or here from the MTP site.
Mainly we were talking about the election, immigration, the cycles of class friction through American history, the strategic and economic implications of TPP, and so on. But near the end, Chuck (whom I know from his days as editor of Hotline, part of the Atlantic combine) asked me where I’d like to live next.
The premise was: over the years my wife Deb and I, plus our kids when they were little, had lived in a sequence of foreign spots, reporting on what seemed interesting. What and where would be interesting next?
I hadn’t been expecting the question and just said, without thinking, “the interior of the United States.”
By “interior” I meant a shorthand for the places other than the handful of big coastal cities that dominate media awareness and the sense of chic: Boston to DC on the East Coast, Seattle to LA in the west, a courtesy extension to Miami and San Diego, and a smattering of others. Basically this media-mind-map creates a picture of the United States as if it were Australia, with the action all happening along the rim.
Of course a sense of excitement about the rest of the country reflects what Deb and I have been reporting in our travels these past few years, but it actually is something I believe more strongly the more I see. If you were traveling the country wide-eyed and mainly tuned out from the national political news, you would think this is a big, interesting, diverse civilization, in the process of dealing with and beginning to solve the many ills of the era.
Much as I wasn’t expecting the question, Chuck wasn’t expecting the answer, but we agreed and went on to some of the political and economic ramifications thereof.
2) Next round of Knight Challenge. One of many under-appreciated aspects of “interior America” is the overlapping network of organizations and individuals working on civic-improvement efforts. Last week, in Birmingham, Alabama, Deb and I got to meet people from around the country involved in the “Purpose Built Communities.” Over the months we’ve met their counterparts from NeighborWorks America, from ArtPlace America, from the National League of Cities, the Urban Libraries Council, MakerFaire and the Maker Movement, Main Street America center, and many others. Many hands, many forces, are pulling in a similar direction. Increasingly they are seeing the resonance in their connected works.
Of the many foundations and charitable entities operating in this realm, one significant program is the the Knight Cities Challenge, from Communities program of the Knight Foundation of Miami. Six months ago I wrote about some of the 37 winners of the 2016 Cities Challenge grants, who shared a total of $5 million in grants for civic-improvement efforts.
Applications and nominations for the 2017 grants are open for one more week. You have until noon Eastern Time next Thursday, November 3, to apply on behalf of your neighborhood, civic organization, or community. Details here. It’s a good program and worth checking out.
RJ Messenger (left), successful Erie entrepreneur, at the Radius CoWork space in downtown Erie.Nicolas Pollock / The Atlantic
I hope you'll check out the second in the series of short films that TheAtlantic’s video team has done with my wife Deb and me, as we’ve been on the move around the country during the election year. The first in the series is here, and my item describing it is here.
Both these videos, produced by TheAtlantic’s Nic Pollock, are meant to match issues that are prominent in the national campaign level with their city-by-city ramifications. This one has scenes from three cities coping with economic and social dislocations: Erie, Pennsylvania; Dodge City, Kansas; and Fresno, California.
You can see for yourself what it shows. But for me one very powerful theme that comes through is the generational contrast we’ve encountered again and again across the country.
It’s starkest in Erie: people in their 50s and 60s, or older, grew up expecting a steady job in a big factory. The last of those giant factories is slowly closing down—sending most of its jobs not to Mexico or China but to (gasp) Texas—and people who used to work there are mournful. People in their 20s and 30s never expected to have those jobs and are reacting differently. As you will see:
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To extend a point we’ve made nonstop through these reports since 2013 and in my cover story earlier this year, the dislocations, the polarization, the pain, and the anger of America’s Second Gilded Age are real. But what’s also real is the sense in many (of course not all) parts of the country that a response is possible, that they can be agents of their own destiny, and their community’s, rather than just objects of crushing outside forces.
That is one of the motifs you’ll notice in this video. It touches on several others that we’re primed to start writing about again (as outlined here), if this election campaign ever ends and if I regain any control over my life: the breadth of the innovative efforts in Erie; the scale of the downtown redevelopment schemes in Fresno and the impact of tech centers like Bitwise (whose co-founder you’ll see in the film); the dramatic step Dodge City took years ago with its “Why Not Dodge” campaign, which is now having such effects.
For now, another look at the previous video in this series, about the difference between the national-level “build a wall!” fury with which immigration is discussed and the calmer tone in the places where significant numbers of immigrants and refugees are actually being absorbed:
National politics this cycle makes me feel worse. Exposure to the country outside politics should make anyone feel better. There is a lot going on.
Entrepreneur Alicia De La Torre, of Dodge City, KansasNicolas Pollock / The Atlantic
Over the past year-plus my wife Deb and I have been arguing that the “build a wall!”-style anti-immigration furor in Republican party politics does not match the lived reality of the parts of the United States where immigration is having the biggest and most obvious effect.
That’s part of the case I made in a cover story in March; that I wrote about in Dodge City, Kansas, in July; and that Deb chronicled in a visit with a Syrian refugee family in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August. Through American history, immigration has always been disruptive—at many periods, much more disruptive than it is now. At nearly every point in its history, people already present have viewed whatever group is most recently arrived as “different” and “worse” than the groups that had previously assimilated and generally succeeded. But compared with most other societies, the process of assimilation has continued to grind on in the United States, and overall (as I argue elsewhere) has been to the country’s enormous benefit.
Now the Atlantic’s video team has put out a great video treatment of this theme. It’s produced by Nic Pollock and was shot this summer in Dodge City, Erie, and also the San Joaquin Valley of California around Fresno.
I’ll have more to say about the video and the theme soon, but for now I say: I hope you’ll watch this. It’s the first of a series of videos that match national-level rhetoric on an election-year issue with the city-by-city reality of these difficult questions. I hope you find this interesting—and, well, moving, as we did in meeting the families you see here.
Again, think of the actual people you see in this video, as Deb and I cannot help doing, as you listen to the next “build a wall” speech.
This screenshot from the video is (a good) part of the on-the-road reporting experience, in this case at Ms. De La Torre’s tortilleria. With me is Ernestor De La Rosa, the city administrator in Dodge City whom I wrote about here.