The city as others saw it: the vice president, the president, and the morning show

NATIONAL NOTICE AT DOCUMENTED STRENGTH

Mishawaka's documented encounters with the national stage are few enough to print whole, and the first is the largest. On October 28, 1908, Vice President Charles Fairbanks — Indiana's own, a week from the general election — was met in Elkhart by a committee of leading Republicans and escorted to Mishawaka in a caravan of automobiles. He supped at St. Paul's Episcopal Church as the Bishop Knickerbacker Guild's honored guest, speaking briefly to the three hundred people crammed into the undercroft and shaking hands in the rectory; rode to Mayor Charles Frank's residence at 813 West Second Street and addressed more than a thousand gathered outside; joined a parade of touring cars through the downtown; spoke fifteen to twenty minutes to five thousand people in the street outside the Century Theater; and then went inside and addressed the convocation of Republican enthusiasts for over an hour, complimenting Mishawakans on their city's growth. The commissioned history's verdict on the four hours is the strongest sentence of civic pride in its pages: they were "the most thrilling evening in the city's history." The verdict is a boast and is printed as its author's; the crowds beneath it — five thousand in a street, in a city of some twelve thousand — are enumeration, not rhetoric, and they measure what a national visitation meant to a factory city in 1908: the whole population, turned out, twice in one evening.

The second visitation took ninety-eight years to repeat. On February 23, 2006, President George W. Bush spoke at Bethel College's Wiekamp Center — the first visit of a sitting President of the United States to Mishawaka, at a fundraiser for Representative Chris Chocola, with more than five hundred contributors in the room and more than a thousand students watching on a live feed in the Everest-Rohrer Chapel/Fine Arts Center. Between the two visits the national gaze touched the city once more in the form this section has already recorded: the Good Morning America live shot of 1983, Mishawaka announcing its own birthday to the country — the city no longer waiting to be visited but broadcasting itself. The put-down side of the ledger, finally, must be printed as the record gives it, which is mostly by its absence: the sources reached for this section carry no literature of Mishawaka mocked — no vaudeville joke, no rival city's pamphlet — and the anxiety the record does carry is the city's own, in Brunner's standing plea that Mishawaka remain "a distinct and separate community," which presumes the threat it answers. The documented truth is asymmetrical and is stated as such: Mishawaka's file of national notice is a file of compliments, crowds, and one morning-show wave; its fear of being overlooked is documented chiefly in the words of the man who spent his life making sure it would not be.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Fairbanks visit of October 28, 1908, whole, with its crowds and the "most thrilling evening" verdict, quoted; the Bush visit of February 23, 2006, as the first presidential visit, with its rooms and feeds.
2. City of Mishawaka, mishawaka.in.gov — Brunner's "distinct and separate community" sentence.