LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in 1759. Johnston’s local economy was first shaped by two river systems, the Pawtuxet and the Woonasquatucket. Water was integral for mills, which were built along the rivers and creeks, drawing workers from the surrounding farmlands. When millions of impoverished Italian peasants began immigrating to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some found jobs in the local mills, while others worked their own small farms in rural Johnston.

      They were joined in the decades after World War II by other Italian American families, who had lived in immigrant neighborhoods in Providence, such as adjacent Silver Lake and Federal Hill. Aspiring to a house in suburbia, many moved “up the hill” to Johnston. Families who had been neighbors in Providence became neighbors in Johnston.

      To the casual observer, modern-day Johnston may seem like a stretch of sprawl from metropolitan Providence. Its main avenues are lined with strip malls, mixing CVS pharmacies, fast-food franchises, and family establishments, like Pat’s Italian Restaurant. Large billboards clutter the commercial landscape, such as one advertising BONDS. Without a pedestrian-friendly downtown or obvious urban spaces where residents can congregate, Johnston appears more like an unincorporated bit of suburban green rather than the cohesive political community that it is.

      Today, the town is a one-party suburb where the real elections are always the primaries. “Big Richard” Delfino—the head of the town’s powerful Democratic committee—mused: “If there are two or three Republicans [in town], I don’t know who they are.” Party registration data show that there are more than “two or three,” though they do keep a low profile. As one local told us, most Johnston Republicans understand that the Democratic machine that governs the town tolerates little opposition. “If you’re not a Democrat in Johnston, you would never get anything, you wouldn’t even get your street swept,” he told us. Thus to be openly Republican is regarded as a sort of treason—to oppose the town itself.

      The Democratic Party is so well established in Johnston, in fact, that locals sometimes neglect to distinguish it from the town. Over the course of our initial interviews, the people we spoke with kept referring to the “town committee.” At first, we suspected that the town committee must be some sort of official body. Only later did we discover that the town committee was the local Democratic organization, formally called the Johnston Democratic Town Committee.

      With so few Republicans and even fewer vocal ones, Democrats utterly dominate Johnston politics. Not a single Republican sits on Johnston’s city council or its school board. Local politicians struggle to remember a Republican winning a municipal office in Johnston. Stephen Ucci, a Johnston state representative, thought that perhaps a Republican won a school board seat back in the mid-1960s.

      Thanks to the power of the Democratic Party, Johnston has also been insulated from the anti-incumbent fevers that occasionally spread across the nation. The 1994 Republican Revolution had no discernible effect in town. Even the Tea Party, often regarded as a precursor to the Trump insurgency, failed to gain any steam. In 2010, Johnstonians gave a mere 32 percent of their ballots to the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, only a slight improvement over the Republican showing in 2008. Meanwhile, Democrats also swept every state race by comfortable margins.6

      Of course, unlike Rhode Island, Iowa is hardly a blue state. It is more purple than either red or blue. The state tends to vote for the winning presidential candidate. It voted for Bush in 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Trump in 2016. Iowa’s congressional delegation is divided: three out of four of the state’s representatives are Democrats, while both senators are Republicans. At the state and local level, however, Iowa has been drifting rightward in recent elections. Its assembly and senate are controlled by Republicans.

      Ottumwa, though, is blue. Nestled in Wapello County, a ninety-minute drive southeast from Des Moines, Ottumwa is home to the vast majority of the county’s residents. It has long been dominated by powerful unions centered in its two main industries: a large meatpacking plant and a John Deere factory.

      Even a casual visitor to Ottumwa would notice the town’s working-class and Democratic identity. The portraits of FDR and JFK, for example, festoon the walls of some of its popular dining establishments. One such establishment is the Canteen Lunch, a working-class institution founded in 1927 that specializes in loose-meat sandwiches and pies. Roseanne Barr based the fictional Lanford Lunch Box on it in her hit show Roseanne, because it was a favorite spot of her then husband, actor Tom Arnold, who grew up in Ottumwa.

      Ottumwa has never been solely a blue-collar town. For over a century, the town was divided in two. On the sloping hills that rise from the northern banks of the Des Moines River once resided the town’s aristocracy. These northside neighborhoods housed the owners and managers of the Morrell meatpacking plant, which looked down upon—literally and figuratively—the working-class neighborhoods on the southern banks of the river. Though they have fallen into disrepair since Morrell left town in the early 1970s, the stately homes on the northside of town are a reminder of the city’s former prosperity. So, too, are the many boarded storefronts on Main Street, just north of the river.

      The working-class “south-siders,” as they commonly called themselves, once provided the shock troops of one of the most militant union locals in the country. They frequently organized unauthorized “wildcat” strikes and were often successful at exacting concessions from their northern neighbors. When the Morell plant left town, so, too, did this strife. Nonetheless, those class conflicts had a formative influence on the Democratic loyalties that were passed onto the next generation of Ottumwans.

      As in Johnston, citizens often struggle to remember a Republican ever winning a local race. One thoughtful journalist at the Ottumwa Courier told us: “I don’t know the last time a Republican held a local office. It’s possible, maybe they have, you know, at the nonpartisan levels … But at the county office level, we’ve always been a strongly Democratic county.” Some locals with longer memories recall one Republican serving a single term on Wapello County’s Board of Supervisors. Jerry Parker, the town’s former mayor, noted that Jim Yenger won a county seat in 1970. Yenger, however, is an exception that proves the rule. He was a pro-union employee at the John Deere plant. As Parker recalled, “His union asked him to run for supervisor. He ran for one term and then he quit. So, yeah, we have had Republicans elected, but it was a long time ago.”

      Though Wapello County almost never votes for Republican candidates for president or for local offices, it sometimes does so for state office and for Senate.7 Chuck Grassley, one of Iowa’s longest-serving senators, has been popular of late in Wapello. Like Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island, Grassley is noted for his bipartisanship, a fact that no doubt has contributed to his success in Wapello and other Democratic towns in Iowa.8 Unlike either Johnston or Elliott, Wapello voters have been more receptive to Republican candidates in election years in which the Democratic Party is especially unpopular nationally. Wapello got swept away by the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994, when the Republican Party seized control of the House. That year, the GOP candidate, Jim Lightfoot, won Wapello in a close race for Iowa’s Third House district. After anti-Democratic sentiments had cooled two years later, though, Wapello returned to its normal ways by voting against the Republican House candidate. The 2010 Tea Party election also shook up the political status quo in the county, but only briefly. That year, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican challenger, carried Wapello by 351 votes. Two years later, however, Wapello returned once again to its normal partisan ways, supporting the Democratic candidate by more than two thousand votes.9

      Unlike Johnston or Ottumwa, Elliott County in northeastern Kentucky is a blue island in one of the reddest states in the nation. The state has only one Democratic representative in its congressional delegation, and both of its senators are Republicans. Kentucky used to be a Democratic stronghold, but its state government has reddened over the past three decades. In 2016, it fell entirely under the control of the Republican Party.10 Yet, remarkably, Elliott County has been practically untouched by the secular transformation in the state’s partisan loyalties.

      Although less than a two-hour drive east of Lexington, Elliott County, lying on the Cumberland Plateau, was long isolated from the rest of Kentucky. The region’s many deep gorges made travel into and out of the county difficult. The national Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC),

Скачать книгу