‘America is Very Purple’: Personality and Place Across the American Landscape.
The country is complicated. In an era of simplistic "Red State / Blue State" polarization, three different approaches to this central, murky, but inescapable truth.
Tom and Laura Ruby, tending some of their orchards and plantings around their home in rural Kentucky. They have lived around the world and have decided that this is where they belong, from now on. (Photo courtesy of Tom Ruby.)
This post is about three recent developments that bear on a common theme: the complex role of “place” in Americans’ identities.
It’s a theme that ran through the entire Our Towns book and our movie, and that Deb Fallows recently addressed in a dispatch from Florida. My latest report on the contradictory strains of where-ness in American life was here.
In short: the importance of place comes from people’s lasting sense of where they are from, and their emerging sense of where they would like to be. Some times these turn out to be the same place: It matters deeply to walk your children down the same streets where your parents walked with you. Some times they turn out to be the other side of the country. Consider my current-favorite California movie, Ladybird, or Mona Simpson’s first novel, Anywhere But Here.1
The theme is rich, and it’s complicated, and it’s the back story of our on-the-move but also-rooted country. Here are three reasons it’s on my mind.
1) William Whitworth, an Arkansan on the East Coast.
Five days ago William Whitworth, universally known as Bill, died in Little Rock, at age 87. You can read a beautiful appreciation of his achievements, and his quirky humanity, in this brilliant Atlantic piece by two people who worked closely with him, Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel. Ian Frazier, of the New Yorker, also wrote wonderfully about Bill here. Bill had been the boss, editor, lodestar, and friend to all of us and to countless others in the writing world. I feel so fortunate to have been part of his time at the Atlantic. I will miss him every day. And I won’t presume to add to the portrait that Cullen Murphy, Scott Stossel, and Ian Frazier have collectively created.
Below is a literal portrait of Bill Whitworth, as I first knew him in the early 1980s. This photo has accompanied countless pieces about him. It would have been at the end of his time at The New Yorker or the beginning of his Atlantic run, when he was in his early 40s.2
What’s the place-connection here? It is that Bill Whitworth—who as “William” had a dominant role for two decades as a New York and New Yorker writer and editor, and for two decades more as dean of Boston/East Coast journalism from his seat as revered Atlantic editor—was always from Arkansas.
He grew up there. He graduated from Little Rock Central High School, famed for the 1950s desegregation order. He began his newspaper career with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. And when he ended his run at the Atlantic, as David Bradley bought the magazine and brought in Michael Kelly as editor, Bill returned to Little Rock and spent the rest of his life there. The headline in ArkansasOnline last week read:
Arkansas’ Bill Whitworth dies at 87; was editor at New Yorker, Atlantic
The first line of the appreciation by Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel is:
William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that 50 years of living in New York and New England never much eroded.
We are all from somewhere. Bill was from Arkansas, and was aware of that identity while leaving his mark much more broadly—including on the minds of his readers, and in the hearts of those who worked with him.3 I don’t think I’d ever seen him happier than when he was leading a contingent of Boston-and-DC-based Atlantic staffers for a sit-down interview with then-candidate Bill Clinton, at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock in 1992.
2) Tom Ruby and ‘Life on the Knob,’ in Kentucky.
Last month I had a podcast conversation with my longtime friend Tom Ruby about these issues of purpose and place.
You see Tom and his wife, Laura, in a photo at the top of this item, outside their house in a small community in rural Kentucky that is set in geological features known locally as “the knobs.” Tom had arrived in the US in the 1960s as part of a Serbian refugee family; grew up, like me, in Southern California; had a long and varied career as an Air Force intelligence officer, with postings around the world; and about a decade ago decided with Laura to begin their next life in rural Kentucky.
Tom and Laura Ruby’s home, in rural Kentucky, in the winter. (Courtesy of Tom Ruby.)
Deb and I visited them at “the knobs” two years ago. I’ve been in frequent touch with Tom Ruby about the contrasts between the world he sees there and the perspectives he hears from the rest of the world. Two years ago he wrote a trenchant Our Towns post on how the possibilities for a “next Civil War” looked from Kentucky.
In the conversation below, Tom Ruby touches on a number of points, but he mainly stresses that concentration on the local, and the practical, is the most reliable course through these fractious times.
You can listen to the whole discussion, here. Note: I was partway through a really bad cold and sore throat when we recorded this, as you will notice immediately.
I offer a transcription of one central point of the conversation below. And—because this would make a message too long for email—I will append the full conversation in the online version of this post rather than trying to send it all in this email. But here is a sample:
James Fallows: I'm going to ask you a personal and local question, before some bigger picture questions. Personally, what's the biggest surprise you and your wife and your family have had? Something you didn't expect about living on ‘the knob’ in Kentucky that you hadn't foreseen?
Tom Ruby:
I didn't think that it was going to be as cosmopolitan as it actually is. We live in a red county, but even the red is very purple, if that makes sense. So it's very interesting to me that if you try to bifurcate something into a one or a zero--a red or a blue--well then you can say yes, we live in a red county. It's very reassuring to me how purple the county actually is.
So people that vote blue do things that you would consider red, like shooting guns out here. My sister-in-law, the first time she came from California on a Saturday morning, she says, What is that noise? And I said, people are out shooting. And she says, At what? And I said, I don't know, targets, I guess. Why? Because they live in the county and they can. Are they hunting? No, they're just out shooting…
And so it's very interesting that even people that vote blue like to come out and shoot guns, and they even come out and hunt with us. The people that consider themselves red, they like to go to the brew pub, they like to go to the Centre College Performing Arts Center to see the shows that come through. It's very purple.
The full conversation is available as a podcast, and as a transcript that I will post below.
3) Arts and Inclusion, in California’s Central Valley.
Yesterday the NPR program Here and Now reported on another side of the American saga of place: People imagining where else they could or should be.
This was a five-minute report by correspondent Jon Kalish, which you can listen to in full here, or in the clickable embedded version below:
The headline on the item is “Bay Area creatives find harmonious synergy with their new rural neighbors.” It’s about how people who have been priced-out of San Francisco or Oakland are finding new possibilities and new homes in farming communities in parts of the San Joaquin River watershed known as “the Delta.”
Deb and I had seen this same phenomenon, starting almost ten years ago, in the Central Valley capital of Fresno.