Like many people, I have been trying to come to grips with the recent national election. It is a process that hasn’t always seemed emotionally healthy for me. But the other day, as I was processing all of the punditry and news chatter about the aftermath, I came upon a reason for hope. That reason is Greenfield.
Greenfield was an election outlier. In all the talk about blue city bubbles and the ocean of rural red across the country, Greenfield is a small, relatively poor county seat of a rural county that went 63 percent to 24 percent in favor of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump on election day.
How to interpret this? Well, I teach a college class called “Beer, Baseball and the Bible,” which looks at American literature, history and culture during the 1920s. In a sense, it is a class about a pivotal change in American identity, when we went from being a majority rural country to being a country where more people lived in cities than in the countryside. The class examines how we as a country wrestled with that change, through the lenses of the nationwide prohibition of alcohol, the rise of professional spectator sport, and the clash between modernism and fundamentalism in the mainline Protestant churches. When the words “nationalism” and “populism” keep popping up to explain Trump’s surprising victory, I feel like I’m caught in a strange time warp where all these things that might have seemed like forgotten history now seem surprisingly relevant.
Greenfield is perched on a dividing line. The state considers us a city because of our form of government, although in our charter we consider ourselves as living in a town due to our small size. The local politics of Greenfield have often pitted two competing visions: one that would seek to grow more rapidly versus one that seeks to preserve a small-town way of life. In the presidential election, I chose the lifelong public servant over the big city real estate developer and I was not alone.
Although I was not born in Greenfield, both of my children were, and this place has come to figure prominently in my sense of self-identity. I live in a bungalow house that was built in the 1920s, and had been lived in by a worker at the Millers Tool Co. Although that worker and I might seem to have little in common, every time I embark on a DIY home improvement project, I see his handiwork and the handiwork of other previous owners of the house, who also labored by hand to keep a roof over their heads.
The way I see it, Greenfield operates as a small town in a country that seems to proclaim it shouldn’t. We have a local newspaper that reports on our little corner of the world, six days a week. Nationwide, that is nothing short of miraculous. We have surviving local businesses in our walkable downtown. Although the manufacturing base is famously not what it once was, people who live here can also go to work here. There is a sense of neighborliness and community.
Do we have a “two Americas” problem in this country? The election tells us we do. But I would suggest the place where we live right now presents an alternative way forward than the one being Tweeted out on a daily basis by the president-elect. And for that, I’m thankful.
Andrew Varnon lives in Greenfield.