At the heart of populist ideology lies a time of mythical, nostalgic greatness. It was no coincidence that Trump’s signature slogan had been Make America Great Again, which begged the question: what, exactly, had been lost that had been so great? His ninety-minute oration the night before had sounded to me like gibberish, an ungrounded and largely untrue fantasy. But it had clearly touched a nerve, had connected with people; what he was saying meant something to the Al Kocickys and Debbies who had gathered to see him.
In southern Kansas I spotted a sign for the Chisholm Trail Museum, and on a warm, cloudless day—a relief after the snow flurries and gunmetal gray of Minneapolis—I turned off the interstate and into Wellington. I passed a string of fast-food restaurants and chain motels and then found myself rolling down a flat, tree-lined street of comfortable-looking bungalows into downtown.
The museum occupied an old stucco mansion, the history of which said much about the fates of American places like Wellington. The town owed its existence1 to the Union Pacific railroad’s march into Abilene, Kansas, in 1867; when Joseph McCoy built a hotel and a stockyard there, Texas cowboys began driving their cattle north to Abilene, to be shipped by train to Chicago and points east. Over the next five years, thousands of those iconic American horsemen drove more than three million longhorns north along the Chisholm Trail, and the little town of Wellington exploded to life. It was a rocking, dynamic place, the leading edge of an expanding nation, full of entrepreneurs and risk takers. Pictures of downtown Wellington in 1870 showed a bustling crossroads nearly gridlocked with wagons in front of three-story brick buildings, a hotel, banks, a grand county courthouse. The place was so busy that Doctor A. R. Hatcher built his own private, sprawling, four-story hospital—the building that was now the museum—where he lived and worked and raised a family.
Today, that past seemed inconceivable. Trains no longer stopped in Wellington. The hospital closed in 1965, and the Hatcher family donated the building to the town. To walk around Wellington on a fall weekday was to be struck with a resounding stillness. Row after row of empty storefronts, the occasional pickup truck passing by on the cracked pavement, the sound of the wind. The frontier was long gone, and Wellington and hundreds of small towns just like it throughout America were on the leading edge of nothing, except perhaps the end of the small family farm and the consolidation of American agribusiness. “There used to be a house on the corner of every farm, and the farms were three hundred fifty to a thousand acres,” said Carla Rains, seventy-five, one of the museum’s docents, sitting in the quiet of its entrance waiting for visitors. She and her husband had both grown up on farms outside of Wellington and then operated their own, where they’d raised their children. “Oh, we loved it. We were fifteen miles outside of town and you could sit out on an evening and look at the stars.” She paused and looked around and said: “All these things in the museum aren’t antiques; I remember most of them.”
But nothing was static. The world changed.
“Walmart opened twenty years ago, and it destroyed the downtown. It was instant. Then people started ordering everything from Amazon or driving to Wichita—to drive thirty miles nowadays is nothing—and now they’ve even had to downsize our Walmart.”
The small family farm was the next casualty. “It just got too expensive,” Rains said. A tractor or combine cost a hundred thousand dollars and up. “We had three bad years and then a bad combine and that was the beginning of the end.” They surrendered six years ago, selling the farm and moving into town. “Now you have to have five thousand acres to make it work, and a lot of young people don’t want to work eighteen hours a day seven days a week, which you have to do sometimes on a farm. Everybody leaves the farm and lives in town or they leave farming entirely. When you give it up you feel so bad.” She paused. Looked away. “Thanks for stopping by,” she said.
I stayed off the interstate through the rest of Kansas and into Oklahoma. It was beautiful, open country, but it felt dead. Town after town with lovely old structures, all empty, with crumbling grain elevators and rusty, weedy railroad tracks. Growing food was no different from manufacturing cars or steel or any other widget: economies of scale and automation had rendered the family farm a dinosaur. America grew more corn and wheat and soybeans than ever before, but fewer Americans were involved. My own grandfather had eventually left the Agriculture Department in D.C. and returned to an eighteen-hundred-acre farm a few miles outside of Cando, North Dakota, growing mostly wheat. He’d prospered, buying a new Cadillac every year and taking vacations in Palm Springs. No one lived on that farm any longer, or on most of the farms around Cando. Now a handful of families in Cando ran huge, integrated operations combining hogs and crops while farming thousands of acres. Cando itself, always small, was a ghost town.
In all of these little places I thought, Where were the new businesses? Where was the entrepreneurial spirit? Ironically, it was most apparent in the frequent Mexican restaurants in or on the edge of town. Out on a windswept highway in Oklahoma I stumbled upon a Mexican food truck whose food was as authentic and fresh as a street stand in Mexico City. In the great dusty and windblown silence of the American midwest, I wolfed down perfect tacos al pastor on double corn tortillas with onions, cilantro, and fresh wedges of lime. Immigrants were so often maligned, but here they were hustling and making money.
So much of rural America now was like this, abandoned towns surrounded by lines and lines of chain stores. They were new and modern and shiny and ostensibly gave people more choice and more options, except it was all the same names and the same brands, much of it from foreign sources. I stopped in a Walmart and, given all I was thinking about, the incongruity of the place was like a baseball bat to the head. A staple of Trump’s rally speeches was about ending globalism and waging a trade war against China: it was China and cheap Asian manufacturing that had destroyed American manufacturing and American blue-collar jobs. And yet, right now, right in the middle of the trade war, nearly every item in the vast store was made in China or Vietnam or Bangladesh. This American, Trump-supporting company was pushing cheap Chinese products and profiting off of cheap Chinese labor. Men’s work boots were the most iconic of items, the foundation of miners and steel workers and machinists and assembly-line workers—Trump’s very base itself—and every single boot that Walmart sold to these men whose jobs were in jeopardy was manufactured in China or Vietnam. The camo baseball hats were made in Bangladesh, the Disney princess dolls were made in China, the TVs were made in China and Vietnam. And they were all the cheapest of products—not just in price, but in quality. An endless array of molded plastic and crummy packaged food and ill-fitting polyester clothing. Every purchase made in a Walmart directly contributed to America’s decline and the decline of small towns throughout the country.
But Walmart was only one piece. Far more ubiquitous2 were Dollar General stores—there were, in fact, fifteen thousand of them in forty-four states (three times the number of Walmarts) and they offered a mind-boggling array of goods. You could get baby lotion and Christmas decorations and mass market paperback novels and mops and trash bags and Legos and clocks and lamps and baseball caps and extension cords and Raid bedbug foaming spray and cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Spam and Golden Harvest mason jars and cigarettes, and almost none of it was local. Over the course of thousands of miles of driving it occurred to me that vast swaths of America had lost all sense of the vernacular. In one stretch of road outside of Booneville, Mississippi, I noted KFC, Little Caesars, Subway, McDonald’s, Dodge’s Fried Chicken, Auto Zone, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, CVS, Dollar General, Walmart, Hardees, Sonic, Huddle House, and NADA auto parts, to name a few. This in a small town, not some big suburb.
There was so little local—not locally designed or locally owned or locally stocked or locally cooked. On the one hand, people could go online and buy almost anything, things that never would have been available in their small town, but their daily interactions and daily rituals were almost exclusively with quantities of mass-produced things which they had not designed and over which they had no control. What, I wondered, was the effect of that? What was it like to live in a world in which you had so little personal control, where so much was decided in faraway corporate meetings? And what effect did that have when a man came along who said you hadn’t been listened to, heard, who said he would make your world great again?