If you think you have Trump voters all figured out, I suggest you spend a weekend in Manitowoc, Wisconsin and actually get to know some of the people. Those encounters might just deconstruct your implicit bias.
I grew up in Manitowoc, a city with a population of 40,000 on Lake Michigan. It’s about 70 miles up I-43 from Milwaukee and just 40 miles south of Green Bay. I return to that area about six times a year, so I’ve kept in touch with the people who live there, the majority of whom voted for Donald Trump.
So what’s your image of a person who voted for President-Elect Trump, especially if you are one of the 85% of Forest Parkers who vote for Hillary Clinton — would you describe them as misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, uneducated, white supremacist, angry and living in a bubble cut off from the real world?
There is a grain of truth in those descriptors, of course, but if you think those generalizations put a typical Manitowocian in a nice, neat box, I would suggest that you are living in a bubble of your own.
Here’s what I experienced growing up and what I still observe each time I go there.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Manitowoc was an industrial town, a mini-version of cities like Cleveland and Detroit. The two biggest employers in town were Mirro Aluminum, which made pots and pans, and Manitowoc Shipbuilding, which made freighters that hauled iron ore on the Great Lakes from Duluth to the steel mills we see when driving to Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.
During World War II, the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company built 28 submarines for the U.S. Navy. More than 7,000 men and women worked around the clock, 365 days a year to build some of the best submarines in the Navy.
Thousands of blue collar workers employed in the factories and shipyards were proud of the work they did. The white collar workers in the offices didn’t feel superior to the guys in the shop since that was where many of them had started out before moving up through the ranks. One of the nicest things you could say about the guy lying in the casket at the funeral home was, “He was a good worker.”
Like many baby boomers, I was encouraged by these manual laborers to go to college. That, after all, was the American Dream. But to earn money for my higher education, I worked at a hamburger stand flipping burgers, at a grocery store stocking shelves, at one of the Mirro Aluminum factories as a degreaser, at Oriental Milling Co. loading and unloading hundred-pound bags 10½ hours a day, and then the Soo Line Railroad, changing ties and pounding spikes all day long. Working class people had jobs that paid enough to get a mortgage and we, their children, could get jobs in the summer to pay for college.
The older men I worked with were proud of the work they did with their hands. I never saw my foreman on the railroad, a 60-year-old bachelor named Art Langhorst, miss a spike he was driving into a tie in the three summers I worked with him.
But in the 49 years since I moved out of Manitowoc, that economy has fallen apart. The aluminum goods are gone. So are the shipyards that once employed 7,000 people. The downtown which once was vibrant with department stores and shops looks depressed and feels that way.
Old-timers grieve the loss of what was once a great place for a working guy to raise a family without needing his wife to go to work. My mom did go back to teaching once I was in school so that my parents could make double monthly payments on their mortgage.
Depressed as many residents may feel, the work ethic still remains. My mom was in a nursing home until she died nine years ago at 99, and toward the end, she needed a lot of care. The staff at Shady Lane treated her like a family member. When I was a pastor, I saw parishioners in many nursing homes around here, and none of them could compare with Shady Lane. The staff wasn’t getting paid any more than people around here. Working hard was in their bones.
I owned three guns by the time I graduated from college — a 44-40 deer rifle, a 410 gauge bolt action shotgun, and a 20 gauge pump shotgun. My dad and I would go pheasant hunting with our English Setter, Slick, and during deer hunting season we’d head up north to Uncle Alton and Aunt Addell’s to join the other menfolk to hunt during the day, eat a feast cooked by Aunt Addell when it got dark, and tell the same greatly exaggerated deer hunting stories they told the year before.
These people, my people, voted for Donald Trump. Why? They certainly didn’t approve of his behavior, but he was able to make them feel like they were understood and, what’s more, respected. They felt like he understood the loss ordinary working people feel when the company they worked hard for gets relocated and jobs go overseas.
They feel wrongly blamed for crime by gun control advocates when, in their minds, city folk have no understanding of how they love nature and take care of the environment. And most of them could not fathom how anyone could approve of having an abortion, let alone a million of them a year, when they were raised to take responsibility for their actions. As my mom and dad would say, “You made your bed. Now lie in it.”
I don’t mean to portray them as saints, but I don’t think it’s fair to simplistically stereotype them as “deplorable.” They are for the most part good people who know as little about urban living and diversity as Forest Parkers know about living in a small town or on a farm.
So drive 170 miles north some weekend, spend a few days in Manitowoc, hang out at the Four Seasons Family Restaurant, and talk to the locals. You might come back with some stereotypes deconstructed. And while you’re talking to them, invite them to come here and do the same.
