Indiana gets a close look from ‘Our Towns’ authors

Journalist Adam Wren, left, talks with Deborah and James Fallows 

at the Indianapolis Central Library

A husband-and-wife journalist team spent five years flying their single-engine prop airplane to cities across America to take the measure of the country.  Now they are turning their focus to Indiana.

James and Deborah Fallows, authors of “OurTowns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America,” are visiting the I-69 corridor communities of Indianapolis, Muncie, Fort Wayne and Angola this week. The tour is the opening event for Indiana Humanities’ new initiative, INseparable, and the pair spoke March 19 at Central Library at an event co-sponsored by New America Indianapolis.

The couple visited dozens of towns, mostly smaller communities not on the national media radar, and provide a vivid portrait of civic reinvention across the country.

“We started this project in 2013 - which seems in some ways like about 200 years ago compared to now,” Deborah told the Indianapolis audience, to some laughter.

‘Positive, action-oriented’ people

What they found were people from all walks of life who were passionate about the places they lived, who believe that if something good is going to happen in their community, they need to do it themselves – from building a new playground to rebuilding Main Street.

“It’s very different from the national conversation. It’s just so much more positive and action-oriented,” Deborah said.

The couple almost included South Bend in the book but never made it to the city – despite an encounter Jim had with Mayor Pete Buttigieg, now a presidential candidate. Jim had done a piece in The Atlantic about mayors, including a Republican from Greenville, South Carolina, and a Democrat from Burlington, Vermont.

“These two people are from different parts of the political spectrum but have all the same problems – and many of the same solutions,” said Jim.

A few days later he got a call from Buttigieg, who urged him to come to South Bend. The traveling couple nearly did but never quite made it.

Midwest feels like home

*But they’re here now, and Indiana looks familiar to Deborah, who grew up three hours east of Fort Wayne in Vermilion, Ohio.

       

“I feel very at home here. It looks the same, people are the same. We’re all nice. We’re very grounded,” she said.

They spent a day and a half in Muncie before coming to Indianapolis and then were headed back up I-69.

“This is sort of our introductory (trip) - setting the hook - for coming back and learning about Indiana,” Jim said.

Indiana a ‘laboratory’

Though they haven’t spent much time here, Fallows said Indiana and its economic travails had interested him.

“The state in general is a really fascinating laboratory for this next stage of economic transformation and workforce transformation because Indiana is so heavily a manufacturing state,” he said.

“People here have a sophisticated sense of what it means to adapt to continuing economic and technological changes.”

Cities in Indiana have been through multiple rounds of economic turmoil in some cases.

“But people aren’t sitting around and saying, ‘Oh, when the Studebaker factory reopens (in South Bend), everything’s going to be fine then,’ which is sort of like, ‘Oh, when the coal mines reopen.’”

State could be a model

That pragmatism is something they saw across the country, but especially notice here.

“The way in which Indiana maintains its connection with the world economy and its shifting of a diverse workforce for new opportunities and challenges, that is genuinely interesting as sort of a model for the nation,” Fallows said.

What else do the thriving cities they visited have? Collaboration and public-private partnerships that get things done. In place after place – from the smallest cities to larger metro areas, they heard people describe their hometowns this way: Large enough to have things to do, but small enough to make things happen, get change accomplished.

“People we talked to, in cities as big as Columbus and Indianapolis, and as small as Dodge City, Kansas (population 28,000) and Redlands, California, (72,000) or as medium sized as Erie, Pennsylvania (97,000) - that is really the token of a place that is taking its future seriously,” Fallows said. 

City after city is rehabilitating late 19^th century buildings in downtowns, pulling off the aluminum siding and installing brew pubs and residential space.

“They’re getting people to live downtown,” Jim said. “That’s happening all over the place, and it’s a sign of real health.”

No self-pity

They were in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago and met the documentary filmmaker who produced “Moundsville,” the story of the West Virginia city stricken by factory losses and an opioid epidemic.

But the film, Fallows says, shows people who weren’t self-pitying or angry, even at the global forces that had dislocated them. 

“They had a sense of humor. They didn’t imagine that the old factories were going to come back. They were thinking very practically, what does this town do, to reposition itself,” Fallows said.

“And I think that is the natural condition of most Americans.”

- By John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com