The Parade Survives. The Tire Plant Was Sold.

The movement liquidated the working town and left us a parade. In As the nation bickers, small-town America still loves a parade, David Marcus for Fox News Digital marvels at the “America 250” festivities in Cumberland, Maryland — 30 new shops opened downtown, a TPUSA booth handing out pocket constitutions, a seventy-year-old amateur historian reciting President Harrison’s 1889 walk down Baltimore Street — and argues that local pride and community spirit can thread the needle of our national divisions. Eat the funnel cake. Forget the anger. He mistakes the ghost of a community for the thing itself.

Let us grant the strongest point first, because I will not soft-pedal it: the parade is real. A liberal retiree named Terry tells Marcus, “I’m glad to be here, though, I really do love this place,” and means it. Al Fieldstein remembers the World War I veterans on the same parade route — “They’re all gone now” — and a Frostburg student with a TPUSA table named Jalen Grimm says, “Just that we love America.” This is the part Marcus wants to be true, and the part of me that runs a farm co-op in Adams County, Wisconsin, wants to be true too. The appetite for the local, the concrete, the place — that appetite is the raw material of every good thing I have ever helped build. A parade is an aesthetic, not an economy. A 30-shop downtown is more than most of my county can claim.

But Cumberland is not “fine.” Cumberland was a place where they made things. The B&O Railroad built west through there. The National Road began there. Kelly-Springfield Tire ran a tire plant from 1921 to 1987 — better than half a century, the better part of one. The George’s Creek coal region shipped bituminous out of the Allegheny plateau to feed the industrial republic. None of that is in Marcus’s piece. None of it is in the parade, either, because the parade is what is left when the rest is gone. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 turned the carriers into yield-extraction vehicles and let the railroads abandon the short lines that fed towns like Cumberland; the financialized strip-mining of what remained did the rest. The fusionist project fused free-market liquidation with cultural nostalgia, deregulating the capital that destroyed the town, and then sending columnists down to marvel that the locals still have the decency to wave a flag.

This is where the right’s patriotism gets slippery, and where the betrayal is. The parade is a sentiment; the rail yard was an institution. The pocket constitution is a sentiment; the wage that put a roof over the house and a kid through the parish school was an institution. A nation cannot be Christian; only a person can, and only with difficulty — and the parish school was the place where that difficulty was once attempted, generation after generation, until the wage that funded it was extracted to a room the family would never enter. The flag is a sentiment; the union local that bargained for the wage was a mediating body in the only true American meaning of the term — between the individual and the corporation, between the worker and the indifferent market, between the man and the boss who would not look him in the eye. The parade substitutes for the institution, and we are told to be glad of the substitution.

I traded agricultural futures on a Chicago desk. I used to trade the corn basis out of Decatur, the same grain that moved east through Cumberland on the B&O. The basis trade does not care about the town. It cares only about the spread between the elevator and the board. The abstracted ledger does not see an intergenerational trust of flesh and blood, a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. It sees a distressed demographic, a “revitalization” project to be flipped, a themed entertainment zone where the culture is preserved in amber while the productive life is extracted by people who will never set foot on Baltimore Street.

Cumberland’s hollowing is Appalachia’s hollowing is the Midwest’s hollowing is the Great Plains’ hollowing. The names change. The mechanism is the same: absentee ownership extracts the place, dissolves the institution, and ships the wages somewhere the man who works the land will never visit. I watch it in my own county, where the Chicago and North Western rail crews were shed by dieselization, the Twin Cities 400 made its last run in July 1963, the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill idled in 2020, the family dairy consolidated into corporate irrigated potato ground, and the school lost a kid for every farm we lost. We were told the market would do this. We were told it was freedom. We were told to love the parade.

Marcus notes with pride that downtown Cumberland has seen “30 new shops open.” He does not ask who those shops are for. This is the amenity conversion of a working town into a leisure backdrop. The town is no longer a place that makes things; it is a place that consumes its own history, serving funnel cake and nostalgia to the weekend visitors from the cities, while its own children work the registers for wages that will never let them buy the house on the hill. I have watched this happen to the lake country west of my own village, where Madison and Chicago money buys a second home on Castle Rock, and our children serve them coffee for nine dollars an hour. The men who built the B&O were not serving coffee. They were building a country. The right’s love of small-town America has been exactly this kind of love for forty years — aesthetic, sentimental, parade-going. It loves the photograph of the town. It does not love the institution that made the town worth photographing.

Cumberland’s tire workers and the George’s Creek miners did not become uncompetitive because the work was bad. They became uncompetitive because the price of their labor, the price of their place, the price of their institution was decided in rooms they would never enter, by people who would not have to look at the empty plant, the closed union hall, the shuttered parish school. The Main Street manager is real, and Melinda Kelleher is plainly competent, and the local chamber and the heritage-tourism board work hard. But she is not the institution the Kelly-Springfield local was. She is the institution that fills in after the institution is gone. The right will lionize the parade and the Main Street manager, and it will not rebuild the tire plant, the rail yard, the wage. The right has spent forty years telling small-town America that the dissolution of its working base was the price of freedom, and now it sends a columnist to marvel at how much the survivors love the parade.

The cure for the hollowed-out town is not a summer festival. It is the restoration of the productive life. The constitutional form already exists. Mondragon, in the Basque country, runs more than seventy thousand worker-owners through a federation of industrial cooperatives; it is the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Organic Valley, a few hours west of me in the same state, unites more than sixteen hundred organic family farms and is the largest organic farmer-owned cooperative in North America. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative I belong to lit rural central Wisconsin when the for-profit utility would not run the wire; the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 financed member-owned co-ops, and within fifteen years the American farm went from ten percent electrification to more than four out of five. The same form, applied to whatever Cumberland can still make — glass, fabricated metal, food, the work that put the wage in the town — is the answer that centralizes nothing. It puts the decision in the meeting hall and the surplus in the place. A producer cooperative that reopens a mill on the North Branch, owned by the men who run the looms rather than by a fund in Greenwich. A community bank on Baltimore Street that takes deposits from the shopkeepers it lends to. Subsidiarity — leaving the town its life, rather than treating it as a plaything for the national economy.

You cannot conserve a community by turning it into a museum of its own former utility. The right has sold the town out from under its people and told them to be grateful for the parade. The 250th birthday is worth a parade. It is not worth a substitute. A nation cannot be a parade; only a town can, and only with the working institution that gives the town something to parade about.