In 2012, James and Deborah Fallows embarked on a journey in their single-engine Cirrus SR22 to explore American life on roads less traveled. Over five years and 100,000 miles later, the husband-and-wife team had flown to dozens of towns and cities across the country, listening to residents beaming with civic pride and witnessing firsthand evidence of economic reinvention. Their journey evolved into Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, a book that examines everything that’s going right in the country.
Exploring places that, on their surface, seem to have more differences than commonalities — Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Eastport, Maine; Allentown, Pennsylvania; and San Bernardino, California, are just a few — the Fallows unearth stories of resilience and creative pursuit.
These towns and cities are not places that pop up on many travel itineraries — which is why they are so often overlooked, James Fallows, a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, told NationSwell during a recent conversation. It doesn’t help that the opioid crisis looms large in many economically depressed areas, overwhelming any positive news that might otherwise register on a national scale. But many of these places are not just surviving; they’re thriving, say the Fallowses. While the national narrative has tilted toward chaos over the past few years, Our Towns can be read as a kind of corrective to the pessimism that currently pervades much of American society.
“I think it’s an actual struggle for the future of the country, between everything that is poisonous at the national level and everything that is potentially renewed and healthy at the local level,” James Fallows says. “And we think it matters to have these people who are doing ambitious things locally be known about, and be connected with one another too.”
NationSwell: Why did you choose the places you visited? And why not a city like Detroit, which has become something of a poster child for urban renewal?
James Fallows: So Detroit obviously has been on our mind because it’s such a classic case. There has been a fair amount of attention on the Detroit story, and we were looking generally for smaller places. And I say “smaller” rather than “small” partly because we went to a few biggish places like Columbus, Ohio, which is huge, and Pittsburgh, which is significant. But mainly the criteria was, places that weren’t getting much normal media attention, where they’d only be covered if there were some kind of disaster or a political race.
We were also looking for [places where] there was some kind of challenge and response; where there was something that was illustrative one way or the other about how the city was doing. We went to different parts of the country and different sizes of cities and saw different racial mixes and different degrees of economic recovery. This wasn’t meant to be scientific in any way, but I feel as if in the end it became representative.
NationSwell: Was it pretty easy to get people to talk to you? Did you encounter any suspicion about what you were doing?
Fallows: Even though I’ve worked for The Atlantic forever, both Deb and I think of ourselves as being small-town people. Many places were sort of similar to where we thought of ourselves as being from, so I think it wasn’t, “We are here from the big city to examine you as specimens.” Rather it was, “Hmm, this looks familiar. Tell us how it works.”
Also, we were not going there saying, “Why did you vote for Trump? What do you think about Obama? Are you a racist?” It was essentially, “What’s happening here? Are the kids moving in, or are they moving out? How does this school work? Is this business going to fly?” We never ask people about national politics, mainly because our experience was once you do, the results are never interesting. It’s going to be just like turning on the TV.
NationSwell: True. You don’t pass judgment on anything you learn, either, even when it’s kind of jarring, like when you talk about the giant pig slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, or shipping pregnant cows to Turkey from Eastport. Is it ever hard to be neutral?
Fallows: For anybody who eats meat, it’s part of what things are. I am not a vegetarian and so therefore implicitly I endorse the existence of slaughterhouses. It’s been this really central, but also changing, part of the fabric of Sioux Falls. That’s where the Eastern European immigrants worked a hundred years ago, and then it had a sort of good job, union wage, and now it’s where all these Muslim immigrants are killing pigs. It really is surreal.
NationSwell: Something that crops up in several places in the book is the idea of public-private partnerships being central to a city’s economic development. Why do you think such partnerships are important?
Fallows: I think for anybody in D.C., if you hear that phrase, “public-private partnership,” you instantly think BS, because you think it’s just sort of a log-rolling or pork-barreling provision of some appropriations bill. I always thought of it as epitomizing the bad parts of combined corporate and public power.
But in many places [we visited], people could point to something specific and say, “This bridge, this library, this auditorium, this garden, this river walk was the result of a public-private partnership.” And I think that the simplest illustration is this thing in Greenville, South Carolina, the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering, a public school where engineers from BMW and GE are teaching these little kids from the poorest parts of town how to become engineers, and it wouldn’t work if both the public and the private weren’t engaged there. So I think my reflexive cynicism about it was incorrect.
NationSwell: You end the book on a chapter you call “10½ Signs of Civic Success.” Can you touch on your most important findings?
Fallows: The secret of U.S. vitality over the centuries has been [that] it’s always stronger when it makes itself more open and always weaker when it fails to do that. [Thriving towns] make themselves open, and by open I mean to immigration, to people at different stations in life, of allowing people to reinvent themselves, etc. To me, that is the idea of America, and it’s at its best when it does that and worst when it doesn’t. So that’s another way in which something is bad at the national level [but] now seems to be the opposite at the civic level.
Another component here is, I think, practical educational innovation. Not every place can have a big research university. That’s something you have or you don’t. But places that are innovating with community colleges and creative schools, K-12 schools, those are important to connect people with new opportunities, and that was surprising because [we found them] in the South, largely. Engagement and also innovation [like with libraries] — you think libraries would be doomed like the corner newsstand. The corner newsstand is in fact doomed, but libraries, even though they were created around physical books, in many places seem to be reinventing themselves. And then, of course, we have the brew pubs, sort of a show of hands for entrepreneurial arts community.
There’s a line in the book from a guy who said, “If you want to consume a great community, you move to Paris or Brooklyn. You want to create a great community, you move to some little podunk place and you’re part of creating it.” People decide that a certain place matters to them. They’re not just passing through there and just looking for a great restaurant and thinking of where they’re going to go next, but how this place will be in the future, both 10 years from now and when their children are deciding where to live.
Tag: Rural America
How the Arts Are Saving Small Towns From Extinction, Finding Redemption Through Friendship and More
Can the Arts Help Save Rural America? Stateline
In nearly half of America’s rural counties, more people have moved out than in during every single decade since 1950: Young people, seeking a vibrant culture and job opportunities, have fled to big cities in droves. To avoid becoming ghost towns, small communities across the country have begun investing in music festivals, remodeling old opera houses and opening art galleries to bring young families back to their hometowns.
The White Flight of Derek Black, Washington Post
His father created Stormfront, the infamous racist web forum; his godfather was once Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. By high school, Derek Black was primed to lead America’s white nationalist movement. Yet after enrolling at New College of Florida, a Jewish classmate (who’d read Black’s neo-Nazi posts) invited him to a Shabbat dinner. As this story of redemption shows, there’s a way to defeat right-wing, racist extremism: not to attack its hate, but to overcome it with conversation and understanding.
California Restaurants Launch Nation’s First Transgender Jobs Program, NPR
Transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed as the rest of the nation’s workers. To change those figures, Michaela Mendelsohn, a transgender businesswoman, hired 150 trans workers at her six El Pollo Loco restaurants, and she recently persuaded the 22,000-member California Restaurant Association to join the effort to overcome discrimination in the workplace.
These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America
Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.
10. The Great Invisible
BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ
9. If You Build It
Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240
8. The Kill Team
An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.
7. Starfish Throwers
Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.
6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story
A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.
4. True Son
A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”
3. The Hand That Feeds
After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.
2. Rich Hill
Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
1. The Overnighters
Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.
The Label You Should Look for at Your Supermarket
Farming runs in Robert Elliot’s family — but he never expected that he’d make a living off of the land.
Instead, he served in the Marines, completing five years of active duty service before returning to the U.S. and taking a job as a contractor for the Marine Corps. In 2011, he was abruptly laid off along with many others due to budget cuts, and he didn’t know what to do. “It was hard to make ends meet so I moved home,” he tells Shumurial Ratliff of WNCN News.
Back home in Louisburg, N.C., on the land his family used to farm, Elliot decided to try his hand at the old family profession, establishing Cypress Hall Farms with the help of the nonprofit Farmer Veteran Coalition.
The organization supports veterans looking to transition into farming with resource guides, training and funding opportunities. It partners with Homegrown by Heroes to help veteran farmers label their produce with a patriotic-looking sticker that informs consumers know that they’re buying food grown by vets.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 17 percent of the American population lives in rural areas, but 45 percent of those who serve in the military are from rural America. At the same time, American farmers are aging, averaging 55.9 years and returning veterans face higher unemployment than non-veterans. Many people think the perfect solution to these problems is to convince some veterans to return to their rural roots and take up farming.
Elliot, who specializes in pasture-raised meats and organic vegetables, agrees. “A lot of farmers now are getting up in age,” Elliot tells Ratliff. “They are retiring, they are getting out of farming. We are losing farms left and right. There is nobody better suited for the job to take over where America’s food is going to come from tomorrow than veterans. We are already adapted to the outside, we like to work hard, we know what we have to do. We will get the job done.”
Elliot, who also spends time teaching other veterans how to farm, told a group of people at the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) that he revamped his family’s farm from a traditional approach to a sustainable one because, “Being a veteran, I don’t mind putting in the manual labor required to farm sustainably.”
MORE: A Nonprofit that Helps Vets Get Involved in Sustainable Agriculture