Gary, the Most American of All American Cities

7. “Epitaph for a Model City”: Race, Deindustrialization, and Dystopia

144 Lake County was supposed to be a minefield for Democrats in the 1968 presidential primary. This was, after all, a county that Alabama governor George Wallace had carried in the 1964 primary. After what was to many the surprising popularity of Wallace’s primary campaign, many journalists and other commentators began to talk about the politics of “white backlash.” Indiana governor Matthew Welsh, a stand-in for President Johnson in 1964, had carried the city of Gary but lost the cities of Hammond , Whiting, and Munster and the more rural areas around Gary. WelshhadalsofailedtocarryanywhitedistrictsinGary.Thebreakdown of votes in 1964 seemed like a new racial paradigm.1 Given four years of nationwide white flight, urban riots, contentious race relations, the independent campaign of Wallace, and the law and order mantra of Richard Nixon, Democrats faced a difficult trial in the industrial Calumet in 1968. Failure to address these issues, warned Rowland Evans and Robert Novak of the Washington Post, might mean that the county and perhaps the whole state might tip Republican in the general election. Joseph Kraft also predicted that Lake County would test Democrats’ ability to wed black politics with the politics of white backlash.2 Yet Gary had long been practiced at countering the dire predictions outsiders read into its future. Just as workers found ethnic community and labor possibilities in the hard-scrabble steel town, and as the members of the Women’s Citizens Committee tried to reform politics and tackle crime, and as the members of CARP seized control of their own environmentalstandardsandwell-being,sotoodidmanyoftheresidents of Lake County forge their own notion of racial cooperation and racial seven “Epitaph for a Model City” Race, Deindustrialization, and Dystopia “Epita ph for a Model Cit y” · 145 politics. Gary was supposed to be in decline. After the 1964 primary and theelectionin1967ofRichardHatcher,thisdeclinewassupposedtotake the shape of white flight and backlash identity politics. Yet when Robert Kennedy visited the steel city in 1968 and took a tour of its streets, a very different picture emerged. “At the Gary city line, two men climbed into Robert Kennedy’s open car, and stood on either side of him, for the wild hour it took to navigate the clogged, happy streets,” remembered Jack Newfield. “One was Tony Zale, the former middleweight boxing champion from Gary, who was a saint to the East Europeans who worked in the steel mills. The other was Richard Hatcher, the thirty-four-year-old NegroMayorofGary.”SymbolizingforNewfield,andperhapsforthecity of Gary, “the Kennedy alliance that might have been,” this combination of Gary’s white ethnic identity and its newfound black power was all the more remarkable given the support Wallace had received in 1964 and the backlash assumed in 1968. Yet here were the three men “standing on the back seat of the convertible, waving to the cheering citizens of the city that so recently seemed at the edge of a race war.”3 Robert Kennedy, the same man whom G. Gordon Liddy held responsible for ruining the well-run corruption of Gary of the 1950, went on to win Lake County and the Indiana primary. He put together the same sort of interracial coalition to win the California primary before his assassination. However, Kennedy’s campaign did not end the political patterns of racial animosity, nor did the shared ride through Gary’s streets with Hatcher and Zale stem the tide of white flight and racial conflict within Lake County. In many ways Evans and Novak were right: the 1968 election did shift Indiana’s political loyalties for the next forty years. At the same time, the racial politics of the late 1960s dramatically changed the way people viewed the steel city. “The blue and gold signs at the entrances to the city proclaim in bold lettering: ‘Welcome to Gary, city on the move. Richard G. Hatcher, Mayor.’” Godfrey Hodgson and George Crile wrote: But the slogan has now taken on an ironic significance. For the most noticeable movement, in a city that was touted as an “urban laboratory” for the nation when Mayor Hatcher took office only five years ago, is a sad one: The whites are moving out of town. . . . The exodus of whites is only the symptom of a whole litany of woes that now beset the city of Gary, and with the best will in the world it is not easy to see where deliverance will come from. 146 · The Very Model...