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ONE WEEK IN THE DEPRESSION'S WORST YEAR
The fullest single document of Mishawaka's culture is the week it staged for its hundredth birthday, in May 1932, with the national unemployment rate climbing toward the 24.9 percent it would reach the next year. The commissioned history preserves the program day by day, and the program is a census of everything the city thought it was. The week opened on Sunday with an interfaith service in Battell Park and a carnival on Main Street with high-dive and high-wire acts. Monday brought a Costume Ball with a thousand participants, at which the Princess Mishawaka contest crowned Virginia Ainlay. Tuesday the public schools held open houses and Mishawaka High School gave a concert, a style show, and a dramatic performance. Wednesday joined the all-city junior-high track meet to the Pow-wow and Bow-wow Parade of children and their pets. Thursday held a civic luncheon at the Hotel Mishawaka and the dedication, before a thousand people, of the DAR's boulder and plaque at the princess's supposed grave in Lincoln Park; that evening the historical pageant played in Lincoln Park before six to ten thousand. Friday was given to the ethnic city: Belgian and Italian folk dancing and musical groups, with demonstrations of Belgian bowling and archery. Saturday closed the week with a street parade of eighteen musical groups and more than a hundred floats before twenty-five thousand people, and a second performance of the pageant.
Three facts in that program carry this section's argument. The first is the casting: in a single week the city put on its Indian legend, its ethnic folk cultures, its schoolchildren, its churches and its bands, and understood all of them as exhibits of the same civic self. The second is Friday: the Belgian and Italian programs were not decoration on the centennial but one of its seven days, presented by the communities themselves in their own forms — a point the ethnic entries below take up at their own size. The third is the verdict the city's own Chamber of Commerce passed on the week: it estimated one hundred thousand visitors had come to Mishawaka for the celebration, and it called Centennial Week "the outstanding week of Mishawaka's history." That is a boast, and it is printed here as the attributed claim it is; but the week it describes — staged at full scale in the worst year of the Depression, by a factory city whose largest employers were fighting to survive — is documented fact, and the choice to spend on celebration in 1932 is itself a cultural datum of the first order.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the day-by-day Centennial Week program, the Ainlay crowning, the marker dedication crowd, the Friday ethnic program, the Saturday parade count, and the Chamber of Commerce estimate and verdict, quoted.