Amid the fertile fields of Iowa sits Webster City, a town of 8,000 people in the midst of an existential crisis. For the better part of the past 80 years, manufacturing has kept the town employed and prosperous, with a factory that made everything from something called a doodlebug to, most recently, washing machines under the brand Electrolux. The tree-lined streets of handsome single-family homes and a main street packed with local businesses are the very picture of middle class America. The phrase “Main Street USA” is even emblazoned on the grain elevator that towers over the center of town.
In 2011, the factory closed and moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, laying off nearly all of a workforce that once topped 2,000. I arrived several months after the last group of workers lost their jobs. What I found was a town that kept up the outward appearance of prosperity and went on with life as though nothing much had happened. Federal aid allowed many people to return to school to learn a new trade; others received severance pay and were simply retiring early. The rest seemed to cope, making ends meet through a combination of unemployment checks, part-time work, or for some, a new job – albeit at a lower wage. Everyone, it seems, is waiting for the other shoe to drop: for their unemployment to run out; to graduate with a new skill which may or may not translate into gainful employment; to find work in another town. Now, nearly two years after the plant's closure, the time of reckoning approaches.
The story of the decline of manufacturing has been told before, though far too often the middle class legacy is ignored in favor of the onset of poverty and despair. With the wounds still fresh in Webster City, people are slowly—almost imperceptibly—adjusting their outlook on the world and their understanding of where they fit within it. Small towns used to be the backbone of America, but they're becoming more of a vestigial organ – still there, still alive, but without meaning or purpose. Webster City looks healthy, and most of the time it feels healthy, yet the cancer of doubt and uncertainty is quietly spreading within.
At its heart, Stand the Middle Ground is the story of a community coming to grips with its place in a changing world while trying to hang on to a fading American dream.