“DID you like it?” asks Cecil Klopfenstein, a bearded volunteer at the information desk of the Studebaker National Museum. The 85-year-old is noticeably proud of the museum’s permanent exhibition, which retraces the glorious, 100-plus-year history of Studebaker, a wagon-maker turned carmaker. Mr Klopfenstein worked for Studebaker from 1949 until the South Bend factory closed in 1963, and he is still the happy owner of two Studebaker cars.
Indiana's South Bend used to be a company town, hosting the headquarters of one of world’s most popular makers of carriages and wagons in the 19th century and one of the big four American carmakers in the 20th. The company was founded by five Studebaker brothers—Henry, Clement, John, Peter and Jacob—the sons of German immigrants who came as blacksmiths and foundrymen to South Bend. The Studebaker brothers' big breakthrough came when they supplied wagons for the Union army during the civil war. Ulysses Grant, the leader of the Union army, used a Studebaker carriage during his term as America’s president in the 1870s. Abraham Lincoln drove a Studebaker to the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, on the night of his assassination.
“Today South Bend is a company town without a company,” says Pete Buttigieg, the town’s dynamic Democratic mayor. Studebaker was the only American wagon-maker that successfully transitioned into motorised vehicles, but the company went bankrupt during the Depression and then faced even more problems in the 1950s, thanks to poor labour relations and fierce competition from carmakers in Detroit. When the firm permanently closed down its plant in 1963 thousands of local men and women lost their jobs. Like nearby Gary, this mid-size city has struggled ever since with high unemployment, a shrinking population, high rates of poverty and crime and a proliferation of vacant and dilapidated houses.
Mr Buttigieg, who is seeking re-election in November, credits Notre Dame, a rich Catholic university that is among America’s top 20, with helping South Bend get back on its feet. Notre Dame is now the city’s top employer. Until recently the university didn’t show much interest in its hometown, but this is changing as administrators realise that the students they are hoping to attract also consider the quality of a university’s town when they decide where to pursue their studies. The university is now working more closely with the government to channel more investment into the city.
The mayor does not want South Bend to become a company town again—the dependence on a single employer proved too devastating. Instead he is trying to lure technology and data companies with promises of cheap power, low corporate taxes and cold weather (data centres often need cool temperatures as they generate so much heat). In recent years some of Studebaker’s former plants have been torn down and an empty lot has been named Ignition Park, which Mr Buttigieg hopes will become a business park for high-tech companies. (Ignition Park has a sister site, Innovation Park, developed by Notre Dame across the street from its campus.) Ignition park’s first confirmed tenant is the Turbomachinery Research Facility, a public-private partnership that will research and test gas turbine engines used by military and commercial airplanes.
South Bend still has a long way to go. Studebaker’s vast, semi-derelict factory buildings still dominate the cityscape. The city’s unemployment rate remains in the low double digits; 28% of its inhabitants live below the poverty line and 75% of children in public schools are eligible for the free lunches offered to low-income families. Tensions occasionally erupt between the city’s diverse communities: South Bend’s inhabitants are 15% Latino, 25% African-American and the rest are white, primarily of Polish, Hungarian and Irish descent. This summer the city’s African-Americans are planning a big protest march. “Holding the community together is one of my biggest challenges,” says Mr Buttigieg.
On May 22nd South Bend, which was incorporated as a city in the last year of the civil war, will celebrate its 150th birthday with fireworks, concerts and a display of Studebaker vehicles. As the festivities carry into the summer Mr Buttigieg, who at 32 is the youngest mayor of any city with 100,000 people, will be thinking about his likely second term. His priorities are to spur more economic development, continue to dismantle vacant and derelict buildings and fight violent crime, with a strategy that involves sending fewer people to jail. After a pretty grim half century, South Bend seems at last to be motoring in a more hopeful direction.
