Algorithms have replaced madeleines as triggers for memory. From Facebook to Google photos we can’t escape our recent past. Every day a photo turns up without my asking for it to distract me from the present. Like this one:
I remember this trip. Ripley, Ohio. In June 2016, I made a radio documentary for the BBC World Service about the 2016 election and traveled a circuit of Ohio, the bellwether state. It’s voters had gone for the winning candidate in every presidential election for half a century to that point. Could Trump win it?
I came back knowing he would win the state and with it the Presidency. Today the state has lost its bellwether status. It is solidly Red and voted for Trump in 2020 and its 17 electoral votes will go to him again this year.
The photo made me go back through a rough draft of history I wrote in 2016 following my reporting trip. What has changed in the eight years since?
First, the essay from 2016:
If you've done any travelling at all, you will know this experience.
You arrive in a small town on your way to somewhere else. The place looks interesting but you can only stay long enough for the townscape to worm its way into your memory. You kick yourself from time to time that you didn't spend longer there and realise, as the years pass, you will never get a chance to go back.
Ripley, Ohio, was one of those places for me - a lovely town on the majestic Ohio river. In 1993, I passed through while making a series about the US Midwest for the BBC.
But recently, I had a chance to return. I had been driving around Ohio reporting on the upcoming presidential election. I had been in places like Toledo and Cleveland and Akron, towns and cities still reeling from the last 40 years of social and economic change in America,
The journey had depressed me no end, and now I had one more day before flying back to London. I was just a two-hour drive from Ripley and headed south on US 68 hoping to find a bit of small town Ohio unchanged by the other social and economic forces that had ravaged much of the rest of the state.
It had been a glorious autumn day, all those years ago when I first visited. I had driven south to the river on the same road through fields harvested and turned over for the winter. Tobacco was a big crop near Ripley and in the barns the giant leaves were hung upside down to dry out.
The town's Main Street ends at the river and in the block before the great waterway was a cafe and pool hall.
There were tables crammed with farmers, workers - the whole male population of the town it seemed - shooting pool, playing cards, killing time. Big open windows letting the light stream in. It was a world entirely different to mine. I went in and ordered a coffee and lingered long enough to memorize the scene but then had to move on.
Now I was going back to ask those folks or their children what they thought about the changes of the last few decades.
As on my first visit it was a glorious day, although the season was spring. I noted the changes as I drove south towards the river. Some of the farm communities have become suburbs. I didn't see much tobacco growing, but the corn was already green and thigh-high.
I pulled into Ripley and found the streetscape matched my memories so I was able to find my way to the pool hall without a problem. But reality always trumps memory. It was out of business, and had been for some time. Almost all the other store fronts on the block were empty.
One more wrecked community in Ohio. I don't know why I expected anything else.
Bruce Springsteen recorded the song, My Hometown, in the early 1980s. It was based on what had happened to the place he grew up - Freehold, New Jersey.
"Foreman says these jobs are going, boys/ and they ain't comin' back to your hometown."
The mixed economy that sustained a well-paid, secure working class with wide opportunity for upward mobility was disintegrating with those jobs, not just in Springsteen's hometown but all over the country.
Ohio is covered with the remains of that era. Old industrial buildings crumbling by the side of interstate highways can seem as picturesque as ghost town buildings in a Hollywood Western. Freighters that worked the Great Lakes lie rusting at anchor in places like Huron.
But they are not just symbols of the past. The world of employment they represented has yet to be recreated three-and-a-half decades later.
The anxiety that accompanies economic uncertainty is shaping this year's presidential contest.
In Ohio, a universal opinion among voters I spoke to is, they don't like the choices on offer.
The Democratic party candidate, Hillary Clinton, is almost too well known.
"There could be a better woman being the first female Aspresident of the United States," Alexis Altvader, training to be a nurse, told me.
"It's easy to back a woman, but it's hard when you don't believe in the same things she does."
Her boyfriend, Josh Corbin, a conservative Republican by inclination and family tradition, is not thrilled by Donald Trump.
"This election season with the way it's been so chaotic, a lot of people kind of started pushing the notion of never Trump, never Hillary," Corbin says.
He will probably vote for the Libertarian Party candidate, although he worries that in a critical swing state like Ohio, which has picked the winner in every election for 50 years, a vote for the Libertarians, who have no chance of winning nationwide, will help Clinton take the state and the presidency.
We were speaking at Young's Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Young's is an institution in south-west Ohio.
A working dairy farm, it is also a pleasure dome. The owners started selling donuts nearly 50 years ago from a small outbuilding. As a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs I sustained myself with many empty calories consumed there while swatting away the flies that swarmed around the cattle pasturing beside the shop. In the 1980s Young’s added ice cream to the sweet treat menu and the place became an institution. Today you can play miniature golf, take swings in the batting cage and eat salty caramel pretzel crunch ice cream.
Young's is a great example of local American entrepreneurialism. But America has changed. Yellow Springs was completely rural 40 years ago when I was a student. Today the suburbs of Dayton stretch almost to the farm's front door and that change is a major factor in the success of Young’s
"Now Main Street's white washed windows and vacant stores"
The daily life of Ohio happens in the suburbs not small towns like Ripley. In Beavercreek, near Dayton, I went to the latest in retail shopping experiences: The Greene.
The era of shopping malls with 50 stores under one roof is over four decades after it started. The Greene is designed like a Disneyland version of small-town America. But each store front has a high end shop in it, not a small business run by a local entrepreneur.
In the spring of 1970, I lived off-campus in a farm house in Beavercreek. It was a property in transition. The farm itself had not been worked in at least half a decade but the furrows that had once been planted were still distinct in the vast back field of the property and made walking it a danger to your ankles. Seeds still blew and occasionally sprouted wheat or corn stalks that withered quickly.
Then, long after I graduated, I-675, the eastern ring road around Dayton was built over the farm. Suburbs sprouted around it. The Greene is situated just off I-675.
Dayton’s downtown had withered by 2016 except for a block along Fifth Street close to the University of Dayton and Wright State University.
The big money investment of the private sector goes to places like the Greene. And Americans seem to like it that way.
The problem with suburban life is that there is no social centre to it. It's all about dipping in and out, being isolated in your car.
I went to the Westgate Mall in suburban Toledo, Ohio. The city's downtown contains acres of empty parking lots, while the Westgate is surrounded by traffic. I stopped into a Starbucks. People were in and out in a hurry. There was nothing there that made me want to linger except the free WiFi.
Suburban life also allows people to ignore the social problems of their society. In Ohio, these mirror the physical decline of Ohio's former industrial heartlands. There are 20 people a week dying of heroin overdoses in this state. Life expectancy among less-educated white people is declining. Many of the old industrial towns and cities now have had three generations of residents without full-time employment.
"Last night me and Kate we laid in bed/talking about getting out/Packing up our bags maybe heading south"
When Springsteen recorded the song a great migration was under way from the industrial heartlands of America like Ohio to the South and South-west.
That was the American way - hard times in your hometown? Move to somewhere else. There is always work.
In 2016, employment is so insecure people don't leave jobs even when they are unhappy with their work. So people feel trapped.
How many of them are there? How much is their despair responsible for the unlikely candidacy of Donald Trump? How much of that trapped feeling do they blame on Hillary Clinton, an advocate of the free trade deals that led to many factories in Ohio shutting down?
I had hoped to talk to people in Ripley, Ohio, about that, but the pool hall was long gone, the town listless and empty, and even the malls in other parts of the state were being abandoned.
That was my first rough draft the memory of which was triggered by the algorithm showing me that picture from 2016. Eight years later, six years since my last visit to Ohio, what do I think might be different?
As I wrote at the top of this newsletter, Ohio is no longer a bellwhether state. Its’ 17 electoral votes will go to the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden is speaking to that vanished Ohio I am describing here. He is speaking to the Ripley I first visited in 1993. He is addressing people who feel insecure in their work when he speaks of creating good middle class jobs and making sure they get a fair crack at the “American Dream”.
I worry that it is a pitch better suited to 2016. It had been only eight years since the crash of 2008 and employment was only just recovering after spiking to nearly 10 percent following that calamity. During Trump’s term of office the unemployment rate would continue to drop until the pandemic. That led to a spike in job lossess but as the pandemic eased it resumed its downward trend. Today it is rising slightly but at 4 % is still very low in comparison to what it had been during the decades when Ohio was being hollowed out. Wages are growing, and on recent measures growing faster than inflation.
But it is important to remember the US Bureau of Labor Statistics only measures employment by those who are in the work force or actively looking for work. 30 % of working age people in the US are neither working or looking for work.
What pitch you make to those who have dropped out of the world of work I don’t know and I’m not sure Biden and his team know either. When he speaks of building a strong middle class I think of the queue of traffic trying to get into The Greene as I left. It backed up all the way to the Interstate exit. The middle class looked pretty strong sitting in there cars waiting to go shopping. The image was a counter-balance to the gutted factories that I had seen around Dayton.
The economic truth of Ohio and all of the US lies between those two images but how you find a winning campaign message in that space I don’t know. Maybe ignore the economy altogether and focus on other issues, social issues, you can win on like women’s bodily autonomy.
Yet, the phenomenon identified by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton as “deaths of despair” has not gone away, In Ohio, drug overdoses still take too many people before their time.
Small towns continue to erode—except those in easy reach by interstate. Antioch College was briefly out of business and now has re-started with an enrollment of around 120, 1/20th of what it was when I attended. Antioch was the life blood of Yellow Springs but the village has not declined. It is thriving as the suburbs of Dayton and Columbus grow towards each other devouring more farmland.
I still think the sense of loss and anger that I heard from people as I drove around Ohio exists. Grievance has been effectively channeled by Trump and his MAGA support-cast like the author, now Ohio Senator, J.D. Vance.
Ohio and its neighbors on the other side of the big river Kentucky and West Virginia occupy three of the top seven places for drug overdoses per capita in the US.
This triangle of addiction is solidly behind Trump.
It’s a sad truth that Biden’s appeals to hope and regeneration can’t match Trump’s appeals to grievance when it comes to winning hearts and minds in this part of the country.
The trauma of decades of de-industrialization, de-agriculturization—to invent a word— and the stable lives and society that were built around that work has wormed its way deep into Ohio’s collective unconscious.
A genuinely improved economy is a surface current. It will take decades of growth to root out the trauma. Perhaps all of us who lived through the golden decades after America’s victory in World War 2 will have to pass from the scene. That memory acts like an undertow dragging us from the shoreline of the present to a place those under fifty have not lived through and can never truly know.
And then there is the pandemic, how has that collectively experienced social and economic trauma settled in people’s minds? That is certainly a big difference between now and then. Perhaps this election will provide an indication.
Finally, there is one certain similarity in Ohio between the elections of 2016 and 2024: People then, young and old, did not like the choice they had for President. People today don’t like their choice either.
Over the next few weeks I will be in the US and will file dispatches here about the election. My focus on this trip will be the US-Mexico border, a key issue around the country but particularly in Arizona, a swing state, one of the places I will be visiting. Please, if you value my work become a paid subscriber so that I can be on the road documenting this most consequential moment in American history.
And remember to listen to the FRDH, First Rough Draft of History, podcast.
And always, always:
terrific article, Michael, as always - yes, channeling resentment is a Trump specialty, though god forbid it should be directed toward his own class busily pulling wealth into the rarified percentages of the uppers. having a hard time keeping up with you! were you not in LA recently? safe and productive travels!