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1948 — 2016 · the depot, the airport, the Century Center
The form: Between the set pieces stand the passages — the candidates and presidents who came to South Bend for an hour and drew a crowd for an hour, each verified on its own record. The printed trail begins with the whistle-stop era's last great practitioner: on October 26, 1948, President Harry Truman's campaign train stopped in South Bend, and the Truman Library's photograph of the rear-platform stop (accession 64-836) names the Indiana men standing with him — Frank McKinney, Frank M. McHale, and John E. Hurt. Twelve years later the form had changed but the visit had not: Senator John F. Kennedy campaigned in the city on April 8, 1960, speaking at Saint Mary's College on "The President's South American Tour" and again that day at the District Democratic Committee Dinner — both texts preserved in the Kennedy Library's speech files under their South Bend folders.
The airport age: President Lyndon Johnson's South Bend event was an arrival: on the morning of April 11, 1965, at 8:45, he spoke briefly on landing at South Bend Municipal Airport, at the head of an aerial inspection of the Palm Sunday tornado damage in Elkhart and Goshen — the remarks are printed by the American Presidency Project; the disaster he came to see is Major Events'. The 2016 Indiana primary brought the modern form twice in one weekend. Senator Bernie Sanders addressed a crowd in the Century Center in the primary's final days — a forty-minute speech the Tribune's account describes in a room gone "warm and muggy" — and on the evening of May 2, 2016, the night before the primary, Donald Trump rallied in the same hall. The rally's crowd became part of its record: the candidate told the room there were three to four thousand in it and eight thousand across the overflow rooms, and disputed on stage the network count of fifteen hundred — the exchange preserved in the broadcast coverage of the night, C-SPAN's among it. Each figure stands here as its maker stated it.
Sources:
- Harry S. Truman Presidential Library — photograph, accession 64-836: the rear-platform stop at South Bend, October 26, 1948.
- John F. Kennedy Presidential Library — the Senate speech files: "St. Mary's College, South Bend, Indiana, 8 April 1960" (JFKSEN-0908-007) and "Remarks at District Democratic Committee Dinner, South Bend, Indiana, April 8, 1960."
- American Presidency Project — "Remarks Upon Arrival at South Bend, Indiana," April 11, 1965, 8:45 a.m.
- South Bend Tribune (Tribune Content Agency), May 2016 — Sanders's Century Center address in the primary's final days; Patrick Roth, "Highlights: Trump rally at South Bend's Century Center," May 2, 2016; C-SPAN, the rally broadcast of May 2, 2016.