chapter 2 Economies of Spectacle and Micro-primitive Accumulation: A Tale of Two Cities

Newton and Speedway

For more than a century, Newton, Iowa was home to Maytag Corporation, a leading manufacturer of washing machines, dryers and other durable home appliances. Through the end of the 20th century, Newton was a quintessential company town, with more than 4,000 of Newton’s 15,000 citizens employed by Maytag. Many worked in high-paying, unionized jobs in the local appliance factory while others staffed offices in Maytag’s downtown corporate headquar- ters. During the 1980s and 1990s, Maytag and Newton seemed immune from the troubles plaguing most u.s. manufacturers, inoculated by highly produc- tive workers, a brand with a reputation for quality and consistent profitabil- ity. Newton’s fortunes began to decline when Maytag’s stock price fell sharply in the early 2000s, triggering a series of layoffs, restructurings and persistent rumors of a corporate takeover (Krier, 2009b). Although Newton’s factory re- mained profitable, by 2005 Maytag’s demise appeared imminent, and with little hope of attracting new manufacturing jobs to compensate for those lost, city and state officials struck a deal to build a privately-owned motorsports complex in a nearby cornfield (see Figure 6). Promoters in Iowa had been laying the groundwork such a deal for several years, hoping to bring to the state a racing facility capable of hosting Nation- al Association of Stock Car Auto Racing () and Indy Racing League (irl) events. The early 2000s were boom years for nascar with rapid growth in viewership, track attendance and sponsorship revenue. Beginning in the 1990s, nascar found success by geographically expanding from its Southern, Eastern and backcountry roots into the American Midwest and West. In 2001, major racing facilities opened near Joliet, () and Kansas City, ks () to sell-out crowds and, in the case of Kansas City, ks, brought a surprising amount of retail trade and commercial investment. Iowa had long been home to the Knoxville Nationals, the title event for the smaller-scale dirt-track motorsport of sprint cars, but with two recently opened nascar tracks within a few hours drive, central Iowa seemed a risky location to build another motorsports facility. In the years leading up to ’s deal in Newton, the catchphrase from the 1989 film, Field of

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Economies of Spectacle and Micro-Primitive Accumulation 37

Figure 6 Map of Newton and Iowa Speedway Source: Google Maps.

Dreams, in which Kevin Costner constructed a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield to attract the ghosts of baseball-past (and paying specta- tors), became linked to the racetrack: “If you build it, they will come.” (“If you build it they will come,” 2003, n.p.). Citing Kansas Speedway’s Faust-like trans- formation of local real estate values, commercial activity and entertainment development, Iowa Speedway promised to deliver a new hope to the residents of Newton, a company town about to lose its company.1 Maytag Corporation was, as expected, acquired by Whirlpool in 2005. By 2007, all Maytag-related jobs in Newton had vanished and parts of the factory were bulldozed. Given this dark news, public officials touted the Iowa Speed- way deal as a $70 million dollar “genie granting Newton’s economic wish,” a “shot in the arm” that would attract “thousands of tourists” while generating enough jobs to keep young people from leaving the state for greener pastures. “This is a great day for Newton, Jasper County and the State of Iowa,” noted one local politician, likening the racetrack to “winning the lottery in Newton” (Karr and Hussmann, 2005, n.p.). Racetrack officials stoked resident’s dreams,

1 By Faust-like development, we reference the end of Goethe’s Faust, where the protagonist devotes his demonic powers to a massive land reclamation and real estate development scheme that Berman (1983) uses as a metaphor for high modern transformative development projects such as Robert Moses’ reconstruction of New York.