What Happened in Winesburg

Clyde, a town of 6,000 in northern Ohio, is best-known for its pseudonymous turn as Winesburg in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. (The Clyde website notes that “America’s Famous Small Town” is both “rich in history” and “home to America’s largest washing machine manufacturer.”)

In the vein of Main Street, Winesburg, Ohio explores the frustrations and loneliness of people living in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century; a typical character, married to the wrong man, cries: “I wanted to run away from everything, but I wanted to run towards something too.”

In this election cycle, though, Clyde gained a new notoriety: According to the Associated Press, about 2,600 ballots in Sandusky County, where Clyde is located, were counted twice.

I have been to Clyde. My father grew up in that corner of northwestern Ohio, and every summer of my childhood we drove west, my brother and I staging violent turf wars in the back seat, until we reached country where the flat loamy soil was carpeted in soybeans and corn. Although I am blue-state born and bred, Ohio felt like home, and our trips like homecomings. I snapped beans from my grandparents’ garden into a bowl in my lap so we could eat them for dinner. My grandfather took my brother and me for rides on his tractor. I learned to pitch horseshoes. On the first Sunday in August, there was always a reunion of my grandmother’s family, when you could look up from your great aunt’s Jell-O salad (lime, with grated carrots) into eyes that were the same blue as your own. Ohio—that corner of Ohio—is the only place in the world where strangers, meeting my father, could place him: “Yes, you look like a Doerner.” It is where my grandparents and great-grandparents are buried, in family plots with room left for more graves. It is the setting for all of my father’s stories of his childhood that he told us when we were children. What I am saying is, my occasional long a’s and my cultural snobbery and my affection for my Massachusetts hometown notwithstanding, there is a part of me that belongs to a red state.

So reading Winesburg, Ohio, I have always felt a certain connection with its unhappy residents, with its quiet streets. Its characters are people whom I’ve known, a hundred years on. Their isolation and misery were mine, genetically; it might actually have been my own, if my parents hadn’t managed to move out of Toledo the year I was born. Small Midwestern towns do not hold the exclusively anthropological interest for me that they do for many Harvard students, who have only flown over them, crossing from blue coast to blue coast. They are not alien to me. And reading the AP story about the overcounted ballots, I felt personally affronted: What had happened in Winesburg?

What had happened, according to Sandusky County elections director Barb Tuckerman, was that in the chaos of election night, ballots had been piled on the floor and probably run through electric scanners twice. The AP quotes her as saying of election night, “It was totally hectic.”

That is the technical explanation. But rereading Winesburg, Ohio, I felt that it was not explanation enough. What had happened to the earnestness, the heartbreaking sincerity of the Ohioans of Winesburg, of Clyde? What had happened to the small town as microcosm of all the frustrated hopes and inchoate ambitions that are so purely American? Carelessness alone does not justify dropping the ball so spectacularly in an election that had so much riding on it. Something had fallen apart.

So often now it feels as though we’re living in the fin-de-something. Blogs at either political extreme adopt a tone of pre-apocalyptic hysteria. And the hysteric in me would call it the end of America. But the realist in me knows that miscounted votes in Clyde do not presage the end of America. They just presage the end of the America I invented during Ohio summers in my childhood, a country where silos and schoolhouses and soybeans stand for an inherent decency that does not exist, that may never have existed.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.