I had my answer when I headed in to work at the County-City Building for the first time after coming back from Atlanta, and someone stopped me on the sidewalk: “Congratulations, Mayor!”
I was taken aback. A little confused and trying to smile, I said, “You . . . know I didn’t win, right?”
“Yeah, but you got out there, you told our story, you had us on the map.”
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 façades, 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.
But only for an evening. If I stayed any longer, I might become depressed. The saddest thing would not be the foreknowledge of loss, though it would be a little poignant to look on the buildings, shops, and companies that would soon be gone and envision their demise through the second half of the last century. But no, the depressing thing would be pity for the people I would see on the train platform, in Robertson’s, or along Main Street, because any one of them would actually be much better off in the South Bend of today.
On those streets of the past I would see people who knew a kind of job security we might ache for. But I would also be seeing people—an African-American laborer or a female clerk—who might be consigned to the same job for life even if they had the gifts to become a great doctor or scholar (or mayor), because admission to a place like Notre Dame was still unimaginable for someone of their race or sex. I would see people living dignified and interesting lives, but know that they did so in a city that was also shortening tho
se lives, its river water and air quality toxic by today’s standards. I probably would not find any sign of gay life, but if I did, it would be nowhere near the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James, completed in 1894, where I would one day get married to Chasten. Instead, it would be in some sketchy bar or alley where men fearful of exposure would exchange coded and furtive glances, totally unable to imagine that in a future generation they might have known the incomparable joys of authentic love and marriage.
Even the most prosperous men to cross my path would be ignorant and unhealthy compared to the average middle-class South Bend resident of, say, 2015. And while the fruits and meats at the Farmer’s Market then might well have tasted better than today’s, those shopping there would never know the simple pleasure of a taco de chorizo, a chicken pad thai, or a California roll—all now taking their place alongside cheeseburgers and goulash as part of South Bend’s twenty-first-century menu. In short, I would see a world that was as good as it got by the standards of the day, but one in which virtually every person’s everyday life was worse, in absolute terms, than his or her counterpart’s today.
To reverse the thought experiment, imagine if I could fetch someone off the downtown street in one of those bygone years and bring him into the present. Never mind inviting a female or black or gay or Jewish resident to show them the transformative opportunities that might have awaited them. Just imagine one of my own counterparts, a mayor from our city’s heyday. On some level, I ought to envy them. The population and economic growth that, by tremendous civic exertion, we are proudly achieving today is still slower than it would have been in their time, and for them it was comparatively effortless as modernity carried our city on its wave tops.
Certainly men like Mayor Carson (1918–1922) or Pavey (1938–1945) or Bruggner (1960–1964) would be saddened by some of the changes to the city they led. They might look at the factory remnants, or the vacant lots in our neighborhoods, and ask if South Bend had been struck by air raids in some dreadful war. And they would perhaps have little use for Thai food, same-sex marriage, or even racial integration. But as I toured them through the city, they would see what civic gifts time had brought to our hometown, despite its many unkind turns. As only mayors could, they would surely appreciate the sewer sensor system, the 311 center, and the law enforcement technology. If I explained it well, they would see what the railroads that developed here on their watch had in common with the fiber-optic connections that flash stock trades and emails around the world and enable a data-analytics industry to employ residents in whole categories of well-paying jobs that did not exist in their day.
WE DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO GO BACK. We just think we do, sometimes, when we feel more alert to losses than to gains. A sense of loss inclines us, in vulnerable moments, to view the future with an expectation of harm. But when this happens, we miss the power of a well-envisioned future to inspire us toward greatness. Here, someone will say I should be careful, as a progressive, to go around speaking of greatness. Especially in this moment, when “make great” is the mantra of a backward populist movement, the word seems associated with the worst in our politics, its champions consumed by a kind of chest-thumping that seeks to drown out any voice that would point out the prejudice and inequality we still must overcome.
Yet South Bend, for all our struggles, has formed my faith in a great future. Any of my counterparts from decades ago would look at our city and, even after noting that it had been diminished in some ways from the one they knew, would have occasion to use the word “great” to describe what they saw.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with greatness, as an aspiration, a theme, or even as the basis of a political program. The problem, politically, is that we keep looking for greatness in all the wrong places. We think we can find it in the past, dredged up for some impossible “again,” when in reality it is available only to those who fix their vision on the future. Or we think it is to be found in some grand national or international adventure, when the most meaningful expressions of American greatness are found in the richness of everyday life.
A marriage can be great. So can a meal, a recovery from illness, or a song. We are shown greatness on the news, but it is also found in everyday lives, and then in the neighborhoods and communities that take on the character of those lives added up. When the potential greatness of our country first flickered early in the last century, it was intertwined with that of our cities. When a kind of greatness in our society became a beacon for others around the world, helping us to prevail in the Cold War, it did so because of a global admiration not only for our space program and our skyscrapers but also the everyday prosperity, however imperfect and unequal, that could be observed in so many of our neighborhoods.
THE PRIMACY OF THE EVERYDAY is brought home to me every month or two on the lacquered floor of a middle school basketball court, where I set up shop for the simple democracy of an event we call Mayor’s Night Out. We invite residents to meet with each other, local council members, city department heads—and me. Sleeves rolled up and taking notes, I sit with my colleague Cherri at a folding table and meet anyone who wants to talk, one-on-one, a few minutes at a time. We may see twenty people or more a night this way, back-to-back. After the first hour and a half, the department heads are welcome to go home, and the council members usually take off. But Cherri and I stay until we’ve seen the last resident waiting to sit down and talk. By the time we leave, it’s usually down to her, me, a handful of other staff, and the school janitor carting off the last of the folded tables and chairs.
Absolutely anything can come up in these conversations, I have learned. A woman is at her wits’ end because of the drug house on her block and asks what else we can do about it. A taxi driver wants to know whether I am going to allow Uber to continue growing here. A landlord says he had no idea that the vacant house with the tall grass on Fassnacht Avenue was on the demolition list when he bought it, and swears he can fix it up if we could just ease up on code enforcement for six more months. A wide-eyed fellow has miraculously invented a perpetual motion machine and just wants me to review his schematics. Another wants to know if I have personally accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Curbs and sidewalks. Aquaponic fish farming. Deteriorating greens on the city golf course. A Boy Scout troop, eager to earn a new badge, waits to get their picture taken.
It’s like changing channels every five minutes between The Wire, Parks and Recreation, and, occasionally, Veep. It wears me out, and the follow-up keeps my team busy for days after. But it also renews us every time.
It’s not that we handle most people’s issues this way; if I’ve seen 500 city residents at these meetings, that leaves some 99,500 that I haven’t. More people call our 311 system in a day than I can meet this way in a year. But it matters, not only as a venue for problem-solving but as a refresher on why we even have governments and politics in the first place: to support people going about their everyday lives.
Our city administration’s mission is to “deliver services that empower everyone to thrive.” A government process can’t single-handedly decide whether people will thrive or not. But we can make it more likely that they will, sometimes by acting and sometimes by getting out of the way. I see our role reflected daily in the faces of fellow residents. A seven-year-old smiles, exuberant, as she runs through a splash pad we installed in the low-income Kennedy Park neighborhood. A mother of three from the Southeast Side weeps at an act of gun violence we failed to stop. A family’s eyes reflect the red, then blue, then green glow of a light pattern painted by LEDs across the cascading whitewater behind the Century Center, a new kind of public art for our city. So many things that will happen today in any one life are possible only because of a functioning local government: mundane yet vital things like a hot shower, a drive to work, a stroll under the streetlights at dusk. The more people can thrive in daily life here in our once-rusting town along the St. Joseph River, the better our city can make a claim to greatness, and the more its exam
ple becomes useful to others.
On deployment in Kabul, I encountered the Afghan proverb that says, “A river is made drop by drop.” It must have been inspired by the Amu Darya on the Tajikistan border, but of course I pictured instead the St. Joseph, as it coursed by my house in South Bend some seven thousand miles away. It is usually invoked at the outset of a big undertaking that requires countless individual steps. But it also captures the importance of working at the local level as part of building a better nation: tearing down obstacles to a good everyday life in a single community, knowing how the small adds up to the great.
I’ve learned that great families, great cities, and even great nations are built through attention to the everyday. That lesson, once I began to understand it, proved to be the unexpected and consistent theme of two decades’ education and work. Seeking wisdom and purpose at the age of eighteen, I rushed to escape the hometown that had shaped me. Then, slowly and imperceptibly, like one of those muted winter sunrises over South Bend, a pattern became visible across all I’d learned in philosophy and literature, business and service, politics and love. At last there is now enough light to see that the meaning I sought was to be found very close to where I had begun, on a path that proved in my case to be the shortest way home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No one invents himself, and a good South Bender is raised to know that his achievements rest largely on the support and indulgence of countless others. This is particularly true for a mayor who decides to write his first book while in office, and I am in debt to all those who made this possible.
Shortest Way Home Page 32