Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  But the racism she experienced didn’t keep Chavez from believing in Elkhart. “The number of people who are supportive of Latinos and immigrants coming to the community far outweighs the number of people who are resentful of us,” she said.

  “I think they [CoreCivic] hope that our momentum dies down,” Chavez told the audience, laughing. “But I am here to tell you that this will not happen.” The crowd laughed with her. She directed attendees to the back of the room, where she had laid out postcards and letter-writing materials on folding tables.

  Chavez intends to continue pursuing a career in medicine, but she put her education on hold—and her family at risk—to defend the town. “If this gets passed the commissioners,” she said, “If they try building this, you bet I’m gonna sit in front of a bulldozer. I’m going to put myself on the line to do whatever I can to help stop this.”

  In the coming weeks, Chavez and Aguirre would hold prayer vigils, conference calls with activists who had beaten CoreCivic in other towns and reach out to the local business community. Chavez even mobilized her three younger siblings to contact their friends via Snapchat. The only worry was that the white Republican business leaders who relied on immigrant labor wouldn’t dare come out against the center.

  Elkhart’s Hispanic population has topped 20 percent in recent years, and Aguirre has spoken with business leaders who, despite being Trump supporters, fear they could lose their minority workers if a detention center came to Elkhart.

  “[One manager] said, ‘I love the Latino workers because they work hard,’” Aguirre recounts. “‘They showed that they are just the greatest employees and I don’t want this facility here because they’ll leave.’”

  But when Aguirre asked if the businessman would speak out against the center, “It’s the same story,” Aguirre said, sighing. “Of course not.”

  But they did—weeks later, as a group. And it mattered.

  Playing in Grey

  On January 18, 2018, Jeremy Stutsman, the Democratic mayor of the Elkhart County town of Goshen, posted an open letter to the community on his Facebook page. It read, in part: “CoreCivic… would create jobs we don’t need at wages we don’t want. Any tax dollars generated by the project wouldn’t be enough to offset the long-lasting damage such a facility would do to our county—both in terms of perception and in terms of creating an unwanted unwelcoming reputation.” Below the mayor’s signature were the names of prominent community members, business leaders and two towns’ chambers of commerce.

  The following day, CoreCivic formally withdrew their proposal.

  But for a long while, the future of Elkhart was in the hands of three county commissioners who had a hard choice to make.

  Back in December, before CoreCivic withdrew, Yoder considered the political consequences of his vote over a ham and cheese omelette at Angel’s House of Pancakes, an all-day breakfast diner tucked into the corner of a strip mall.

  “If we said yes to this, it would be politically potentially really bad,” he said, shrugging. “People’s memories are short, but I would be up for re-election the year that this opens.” It’s not just about welcoming all people, he explained: It’s about welcoming all industries, too, even if they might not be the most palatable.

  (The night before, at the school, he had joked about the high barrier that would encase the CoreCivic facility. “The only thing you’ll see is a welcome sign. Huh. Oh sorry. A bad joke.”)

  In five-minute intervals, Yoder would gently decline a refill on coffee from Angel’s attentive waitstaff. It was already close to 11 in the morning, and the breakfast crowd had begun to empty out of the spacious diner. Something about the interior felt too big—like it had had another life as a department store before transitioning to pancakes.

  The decision would have defined the small-town official’s political identity. He’d either be the fear-mongering racist who was comfortable alienating Elkhart’s large Hispanic minority, or the bleeding-heart liberal who kept good jobs out of Elkhart. But there was something aspirational in Yoder’s eyes when he talked about the vote.

  He knew about CoreCivic’s well-documented history of civil rights abuses. For him, that history wasn’t a deterrent. It was an opportunity to exert oversight, something private prisons have always resisted. He wanted to make a real difference in a problematic industry.

  “Regular oversight,” he stressed, looking over the top of his glasses. “Not just once a year or whenever there’s complaints. Regular.”

  Now he won’t get the chance.

  “There was absolutely no community interest in [oversight],” Yoder admitted over the phone in late January, just days after CoreCivic withdrew. The organized opposition to the facility didn’t want to play in shades of grey; they wanted Yoder to say no. “It was my attempt to make a little bit of lemonade, but it was essentially DOA.”

  The Battle and The War

  Based firmly in the local faith community, the Coalition in Elkhart attacked the CoreCivic proposal from multiple fronts—with land use, economic, humanitarian, and moral arguments against immigration detention. It brought Catholics together with Mennonites, union workers together with immigration activists, and the white community together with the very people who would be affected by an increased ICE presence.

  Sreekala Rajagopalan was a small middle-aged Indian woman who held her hands close to her chest when she talked. She’d lived in Goshen for 45 years, and it was her timorous voice that resonated the loudest among the arguments against the center.

  “I feel that the attack will be on all brown people, whether they are documented or undocumented,” she said, her voice beginning to wobble. “Am I supposed to carry my—I’m sorry, I’m vibrating with emotions.” Rajagopalan paused and breathed, closing her eyes for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was hard. “But am I supposed to carry my documents showing that I’m a citizen in my pocket all the time?”

  Commissioner Suzanne Weirick, another of the three who would have decided the fate of the detention center, said she received more than 300 letters and postcards from the vocal coalition opposing the facility, and just a handful supporting it. Throughout the process, Weirick solicited evidence and opinions from all sides to make the best decision for the county. But she couldn’t let emotional pleas distract her from practical concerns, she said. She figured that most of the immigrants in detention would have been convicted of crimes. “I’m sorry, if you’re a felon, your rights are kind of suspended while you’re serving your conviction. Whether you’re in detention in Indiana or in Arizona, you’re probably not going to be getting Ben and Jerry’s.”

  In fact ICE detainees are going through a civil process, not a criminal one. De jure detention has never been intended as a punishment; it’s meant to hold people until they’re processed through immigration court.

  Misinformation swirled around the proposal—would the facility hold felons or just undocumented people rounded up by ICE? Would they be held in minimum or maximum security? No one seemed to have the exact answer, making the commissioners’ decision all the more harrowing.

  Ultimately Weirick felt it was a clear decision for the commissioners. “Overwhelmingly, the community said that this was not a vibrant community initiative.”

  Frank Lucchese, the third county commissioner, did not return requests for an interview.

  Yoder said there was “obviously a sense of relief” about CoreCivic choosing to leave Elkhart. He chose his words carefully, pausing for long moments. The community would have to evaluate what almost happened to them, and Yoder wasn’t sure what the next steps would be. He laughed over the phone. “I’ve not really given you anything there, have I?”

  But Marbella Chavez knew exactly how to proceed: A party. “Stay tuned,” she said in a text, followed by a smiling emoji.

  OTTAWA COUNTY: MAKE VACATIONLAND GREAT AGAIN

  VINCE GUERRIERI

  For most of its 227 miles, Ohio Route 2 runs not far from the shore of Lake Erie.
<
br />   A stretch of the highway in Erie County is named for 1965 Miss America Jackie Mayer, who grew up in Sandusky. And on the west side of Cleveland, Route 2 is the Shoreway—where a key scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier was filmed (although you might not recognize it now that the highway has been transformed into a scenic boulevard).

  But in Ottawa County, it’s the main thoroughfare through the northern end of the county. As a highway, it goes through the Marblehead Peninsula, home to beach and summer homes, and into Port Clinton, the county seat. Then it turns into a rural road, going through acres of farmland and past Camp Perry, a National Guard training and marksmanship facility, and the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant before heading into Lucas County, where it becomes a main drag into and through Toledo.

  In 2012, Barack Obama took Route 2 to get from Toledo to an appearance in Sandusky, stopping at a local fruit stand and a local coffee shop. Every election year, it’s always been dotted with campaign signs—and in 2016, it was filled with signs for Donald Trump, who ended up winning the county with 57 percent of the vote on his way to taking Ohio.

  If Ohio’s a bellwether state in presidential politics, then Ottawa County is its distillation. In 1944, it picked Thomas Dewey over Franklin Roosevelt—which might have been due to the presence of John W. Bricker on the ticket. (Bricker, a former governor, remains the last Ohioan to appear on a major party presidential ticket.)

  In every presidential election but one since then, it’s gone with the winner. The lone exception? In 1960, when it voted for Richard Nixon, despite John Kennedy’s last minute push in the state. The early pages of Theodore White’s seminal The Making of the President 1960 chronicle Kennedy’s disappointment, noting that on Election Night, he took off his jacket and rolled up his right sleeve to show a hand and forearm scratched, swollen and callused from meeting what he thought were adoring crowds, and said “Ohio did this to me.”

  About two months before the 2016 election, I talked to former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern, who lives in Ottawa County, for a news story that never saw the light of day. He said then that Trump was able to tap into a lot of disenchantment and voter frustration, noting, “If yard signs could vote, Trump would win Ottawa County in a walk.” But still, Redfern seemed sure that Hillary Clinton would triumph.

  My introduction to Donald Trump was my grandmother’s People magazines in the 1980s. He seemed like a buffoon who was far enough away from me as not to be toxic. I covered his performance in the first Republican presidential debate in 2015 for Belt Magazine and assumed it was just a matter of time before he would be seen as the snake-oil salesman he was. I too figured Hillary Clinton would win.

  When Ottawa County voted for Dewey and Bricker in 1944, it, like a lot of Northern Ohio, was filled with heavy industry. Port Clinton was home to the Erie Ordnance Depot and factories like Matthews Boats, Celotex and Standard Products, while the Marblehead peninsula was laden with limestone quarries. The atomic age led to a need for beryllium, and Brush built a processing plant in 1953 in Elmore, in the western end of the county.

  Ottawa County was a perfect representation of the Democratic New Deal coalition at the time, with agriculture in the western end of the county and factory workers, many immigrants or first-generation Americans and almost entirely unionized, in small towns like Port Clinton and Oak Harbor.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the western end of the county started to vote more with the Republican Party, and deindustrialization took its toll. Matthews declared bankruptcy in 1975. Standard Products closed in 1993 and Celotex followed in 2001, just leaving behind sites that needed millions in industrial cleanup before redevelopment took place. There’s only one quarry left on the Marblehead Peninsula. Manufacturing dropped from 55 percent of total employment in the county in 1965 to 25 percent three decades later.

  Sociologist Robert Putnam grew up in Port Clinton, and used the city in his latest book, Our Kids, as shorthand for the disintegration of the American Dream. (As he was writing it, he actually called me to verify my account in the local paper of a Port Clinton High School graduation as being a packed house.) The Port Clinton he grew up in provided enough economic opportunity for him to attend Swarthmore after a relatively middle-class upbringing. Today, Ottawa County’s poverty rate approaches 11 percent—still below the state and national average, but a vast increase in just fifteen years.

  The county regularly has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state—but only in the winter. It’s become a seasonal area, taking advantage of its lakefront location and really embracing tourism, one of the remaining growth industries in Ohio.

  The region was known as Vacationland in the 1960s, with small rental cottages and tourist attractions like Prehistoric Forest, a ten-acre site populated with statues of dinosaurs (as seen in Tommy Boy, which takes place in and around Sandusky, and was filmed all over Northwest Ohio). The soil around Lake Erie and its islands made it ideal for growing grapes and winemaking. And of course, Port Clinton still bills itself as the Walleye Capital of the World, and has an annual Walleye Festival in May and a Walleye Drop on New Year’s Eve.

  Now, tourism is big business, generating $371 million in revenue in Ottawa County in 2015, according to Lake Erie Shores & Islands, leading more than $42 million in tax revenue. It’s estimated that half of the houses in Catawba, Portage or Danbury townships—all communities on the Marblehead peninsula—are second homes for vacationers or retirees who want to spend time on the lake.

  Nostalgia remains a driving force—as it is in every tourism-driven area, with business dependent on good feelings and warm memories. And it’s not always a force for good. The Port Clinton Robert Putnam grew up in is gone, and a lot of people want it back.

  “Economic anxiety” has become an excuse to provide cover to Trump voters who might not be racists themselves, but certainly weren’t turned off by his bigoted displays. And I’m certain there are people like that in Ottawa County, if for no other reason than the county is 97 percent white and 99 percent native-born citizens (although I take a little pride in the fact that the only Confederate flags I have ever seen were for Civil War re-enactments or at Johnson’s Island, the former Confederate prisoner of war camp that still contains a Civil War cemetery).

  But in Ottawa County, economic fears are legitimate. It’s difficult to make a living in agriculture anywhere. Good-paying non-seasonal jobs were hard to come by. One of the county’s largest (and best-paying) employers is the nuclear power plant. The plant has had problems with cracks and repairs for years, and owner First Energy announced plans in 2017 to sell it or close it down. Absent a state bailout, options appear more likely for the latter than the former.

  Even seasonal jobs remain in jeopardy. The biggest thing Ottawa County has going for it is Lake Erie. Fish available at the restaurants and diners along the lakefront come from there. The charters and recreational boaters use it. Some municipalities even get their drinking water from it—including Carroll Township.

  One of the last things I covered as a journalist in Ottawa County was a brief crisis in Carroll Township when algae made the water undrinkable for a few days. The largest threat to Lake Erie—indeed, all the Great Lakes—is algae blooms that could choke off sea life and make the water undrinkable for humans. The blooms are fed by excessive phosphorus in the water, which comes from waste, either from runoff from improperly spread fertilizer or improperly treated (or entirely untreated) sewage from larger cities.

  The water crisis in Carroll Township was the metaphorical canary in the coal mine. The following year, the same thing happened in the city of Toledo—which also draws water from Lake Erie’s western basin—this time affecting hundreds of thousands of people. The situation was remedied in a couple weeks, which doesn’t seem like a long time until you can only drink bottled water. It hasn’t been as bad since, mostly because of dryer conditions and not any real steps taken to remediate the problem.

  And with Donald Trump in the White House, that
might not change for the better. Cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency certainly won’t help Lake Erie, and Ohio’s representatives, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, joined together to fight for Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which was to be drastically slashed in the Trump administration’s first proposed budget.

  Since he took office in 2011, Gov. John Kasich has promised a more pro-business Ohio Department of Natural Resources, and although he came down firmly against Trump in 2016, his potential successors on the Republican side are trying desperately to out-Trump each other.

  “Make America Great Again” has turned into a siren song.

  LIFE AND BELONGING IN KNOX COUNTY, OHIO

  SEAN DECATUR

  Once you start to see them, you see them everywhere. You may think that at some point they will fade into the background, become just a part of the landscape, but each sighting is as jarring as the first. Each raises questions about whether I belong.

  I drive by one of the local fire stations in Monroe Township, just a bit outside of my town of Gambier, in Knox County, Ohio, and what catches my eye is not the Stars and Stripes flying in front of the station, but a Confederate flag, atop on an even higher pole, on neighboring property, just close enough to make the distinction hard to see. Is this a statement?

  An aggressive driver honks in the grocery store parking lot, and when I look over into the cab of the pickup, I notice a Confederate flag draped over the seat. Was this normal angry driving, or something more sinister?

  I go to pick up my son and his friends from a movie on a Saturday night. In the parking lot I see another truck with a Confederate flag in the back. Almost instinctively I think, is my son OK? He soon comes out of the theater, laughing with his friends, and they pile into the car. Does he see the flag? Or has this been such a common sight during his formative years that he fails to notice?