America disrupted: Troubles cleave a nation, and a city
One national crisis after another has left citizens divided, angry
SAGINAW, Mich. — It was difficult to celebrate America in Saginaw this year. The deadly coronavirus had torn through the county. Unemployment had surged five-fold. Weeks of protest over racial inequality left many debating what should be hallowed and what must be changed.
But Tom Roy had given it his best. As the head of the July Fourth fireworks board, he struggled to save the display of red-rocketed flares and bursting peonies, fruitlessly seeking a venue that felt safe from the sickness.
He couldn’t do it. So Saginaw canceled its festivities, upsetting many of Roy’s neighbors who lost an opportunity to unify a bitterly divided community for one night.
The dark skies over this mid-Michigan city were a plaintive marker of a nation utterly disrupted in a matter of months.
This period of national crisis has not inspired unity. Americans are aiming their anger at each other, talking past each other, invoking race, class and culture. They cannot even agree on the need to wear a mask to protect against a virus that has killed more than 130,000 Americans.
These forces are converging as the country hurtles toward a convulsive presidential election. President Donald Trump continues to portray himself as a disrupter, with a wrecking-ball agenda that is rooted in nationalism and roils racial divisions — taking the stage over the July Fourth weekend to warn of “new far-left fascism” that would tear down “our national heritage.” His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, meanwhile, calls for a national reset to something resembling normal for a “suffering” nation.
“It’s never been this divided,” says Roy, vice chairman of Saginaw’s Republicans.
It is in places like Saginaw County, Mich., which narrowly flipped from voting for President Barack Obama to voting for Trump, where clarity about America’s future is likely to come.
The traditional battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, and emerging ones such as North Carolina and Arizona, have all been hit with the triple shock of a pandemic, recession and an uprising against police abuse. The political fallout is unfolding, leaving a striking degree of uncertainty just four months from Election Day.
Will younger voters, whose generation is the first since World War II to be faring worse than their parents, turn out? Will older voters, those most vulnerable to the coronavirus, seek change? Will the growing political power of Black women manifest itself in ways that swing key states? Will the suburbs once again provide the pivot points in the country’s partisan divide?
The election will provide answers to all these questions, but not necessarily to the central issue of American life in the year 2020: Can the United States pull itself together?
The country is beset by “parties who see each other as ‘the other’ instead of collaborators in a democracy,” says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
“A crisis allows you, if you’ve got the leadership, to unite the nation. What’s needed — and we’ve seen this for a while — is a national direction,” she said.
In 2010, out of love for his ailing hometown, a Saginaw artist spraypainted some familiar lyrics on the husks of buildings and stumps of concrete steps: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”
But in 1968, when Simon & Garfunkel released “America” — starting their hitchhiking narrator’s cross-country odyssey in Saginaw — the city was a very different place.
The population then was nearly twice as large as the 48,115 people who now call it home. General Motors alone operated at least eight plants in the city and surrounding county, providing middle-class jobs that drew African Americans from the Deep South. The Great Migration gave Saginaw its most famous native son: Stevland Hardaway Judkins, better known as Stevie Wonder.
The Saginaw River slashes a diagonal line through the city and became a dividing line between Black residents on the east side and white residents on the west.
GM stumbled and there were layoffs and closures — manufacturing jobs dropped by 50 percent in the last 30 years. White people fled to the suburbs, the population declined, and the question arose: How to save Saginaw?
The answers have been disjointed — and none erased the economic inequality or racial segregation. The city of Saginaw, 45 percent Black, has a median income of $29,800, while the majority white county has a median income of $47,000.
In 2016, the area ended a Democratic voting streak. By just 1,073 votes, voters in the county entrusted Trump to revive its fading industrial hub.
Yet the people of Saginaw are now coping with a 20.7 percent jobless rate, more than four times the rate on Election Day 2016. There have been 123 confirmed deaths so far from COVID-19, among the top 10th of counties per capita nationwide. Trump’s promise of a renaissance in manufacturing remains unmet.
And despite all the hardship, or because of it, Dave Adams believes that Saginaw might help save America — from Trump.
Until February, Adams was athletic director at Swan Valley High School, a suburban school with about 580 students. He had dabbled in local politics, enjoying the competition that so reminded him of sports, but Trump’s election changed him.
The former social studies teacher used to make a point of teaching students about respect for the presidency. But Donald Trump, he thought, showed no respect for the office he held.
At 47, in a sort of midlife political crisis, Adams left his job. He would help turn out voters for the Democrats. He wanted to live without regrets, he says.
“You don’t want to look back and say woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Adams says.
Trump’s very nature had forced him to take a stand. “I always thought that the president should be a role model,” Adams says. “The current president is so far from it, for me, that it blows my mind. It’s everything I’m against.”
Trump came to power as a bulldozer, an approach that had wider-than-expected appeal in a country that was fed up with Washington’s chronic fighting and inertia. The president has emphatically kept his promise to upend American politics, but in the process has ripped at racial wounds, antagonized allies and courted foes, been impeached and acquitted, and flouted norms of presidential leadership.
Relatively few Americans think Trump tells the truth or cares about people like them, but neither point is a deal-breaker for his supporters. A majority of Americans believe the country is off track and in a June poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about two-thirds said they believe Trump is making America more divided.
Even Republicans are more likely to describe Trump as divisive than unifying, 37 percent to 20 percent. But they still overwhelmingly approve of the job he’s doing.
They like the idea of a tough businessman who speaks his mind, cuts taxes, appoints conservative judges and promises to crack down on illegal immigration. And even if they have misgivings about his style, many Republicans believe a Democrat would be worse.
But the Trump style that worked well in times of relative calm — inattention to detail, indifference to briefings, go-with-your-gut decisions — is now facing an ultimate test in the face of real crises, not those of his invention.
A virus cannot be dispatched with a tweet. Four months into the fight against the disease, the U.S. has more than 2.9 million infections.
For Adams, that means his new job — canvassing neighborhoods looking for voters — has become a health risk, and much of the work has shifted to calls and online meetings.
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now,” says the narrator of the song “America,” deeply weary as he boards a bus in Pittsburgh.
Look for America in 2020 and you’ll find exhaustion. So many tribulations, so much strife. But there are those in Saginaw who say maybe the United States isn’t being pulled apart. Maybe it’s growing, even if uncomfortably so.
The Rev. Hurley Coleman is head of the World Outreach Campus Church, a congregation founded by his parents in 1957 in their living room on Saginaw’s east side. He knows it’s a hard time to talk about hope.
In the past month, he’s lost a parishioner to gun violence. Many in his congregation are struggling to survive on low-wage jobs or as front-line health workers. He hasn’t delivered a sermon in person in weeks, but he has participated in three marches since last month.
Those recent protests were the first time he’s seen Black and white people march together in Saginaw for racial equality, he said. They walked together — crossing the bridge over the Saginaw River — to call for change. It made him think this might be a moment of such upheaval that even long-standing barriers are broken, divides disrupted.