Chris Maisano: This project entailed extensive fieldwork in three small postindustrial cities in the Midwest — one in Wisconsin, one in Indiana, one in Minnesota. What do these three places have in common and what differentiates them from each other?
Stephanie Ternullo: All three places are in counties that I refer to as part of the white working-class New Deal coalition. These were places that were overwhelmingly white in the 1930s and 1940s and remain so to the present. Their economic base has been in working-class occupations throughout that time, but they’ve all experienced shifts from manufacturing to service sector work. They all voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four presidential elections. So these are places that have similar racial and economic makeups and had shared politics at one point, but they’ve taken distinct political trajectories since the late 1960s.
“Lutherton” in Indiana turned to the right in the late 1960s, and then even further to the right in the early 2000s. “Gravesend” in Minnesota was a swing city for several decades, then really turned hard to the right in 2016 and stayed there in 2020. Then there’s a place in Wisconsin, “Motorville,” that still votes for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot today. Motorville is one of the 4 percent of those original white working-class New Deal counties still voting Democratic today. It’s really an outlier. So these cities represent a perfect combination of similarity and difference. They are all white postindustrial cities with different kinds of politics — but at one point in time, under certain political and economic conditions, they did share the same politics. A lot of the book ends up focusing on what keeps that one Wisconsin city in the Democratic coalition, when almost all its counterparts have left.
Chris Maisano: In your endnotes, you indicate that one of the main things that distinguishes Motorville from Lutherton and Gravesend is that, over a century ago, it had had strong traditions of Knights of Labor and Socialist Party organizing and militant labor struggles. One of the main things I took from your book is how important these deep histories stretching back before the Great Depression and the New Deal are in shaping contemporary politics in these places.
Stephanie Ternullo: All three places share basic similarities that I already described, but they also did have key organizational, political, and cultural differences before the New Deal. All three had a Knights of Labor temple, but Motorville had a tradition of labor militancy. Workers were striking in the streets. They engaged in kinds of broad labor action that drew the entire community in. There was violent repression by the police for years at the end of the nineteenth century.