Smyrna, Tenn.: A Japanese Auto Maker Finds a Home

RUTHERFORD COUNTY IS in central Tennessee—or “Middle Tennessee,” as the natives say—about twenty miles southeast of Nashville, on gently rolling land that traditionally has been devoted to farming, mostly livestock. The people who live there like to express their feelings by naming roads. The short two-lane highway that connects Interstate 24 with Smyrna, a town of about 9,000 in the northwest corner of the county, is called the Sam Ridley Parkway, a gesture of respect for the mayor of Smyrna, who has held the job since 1947, and will keep it unless a court of appeals upholds the ruling by which he was thrown out of office last year. (The judge who made that ruling, on charges of official misconduct, has allowed Ridley to stay on until his appeals are exhausted; the citizens of Smyrna, for their part, have since returned him to office by a three-to-one margin, with the largest election turnout in the town’s history.)

The late Earl Coleman, one of Sam Ridley’s close friends and business associates (they were partners, for example, in the Chevrolet dealership that maintained Smyrna’s police cars, one of which allegedly required twenty tires in a single year), once gave his secretary the privilege of christening a street in a Smyrna subdivision, and she named it Mason Drive, after her boyfriend, Jerry.

Several months ago, the Smyrna city fathers combined a few old streets—including one named for J. S. Young, Sam Ridley’s grandfather—and renamed them Nissan Drive, in appreciation of the Japanese auto company that is currently building a half-billion-dollar plant at the edge of town. This plant, which will assemble the small Datsun pickup trucks that have become so popular with American drivers, is said to constitute the largest Japanese investment ever made in the U.S. To attract it, the town of Smyrna promised, among other things, to expand its fire department and to build a gas line worth about $1.5 million; Rutherford County contributed a property-tax break worth at least $10 million, perhaps several times that; the State of Tennessee chipped in $7.3 million to train plant employees and more than $12 million for new roads. The biggest of the new roads, a four-lane highway that will connect the plant with I-24, was named early last year by the Rutherford County road board. At the suggestion of Kenneth Victory, who was then one of the county’s twenty-one commissioners, the board dubbed this highway the Lee Victory Parkway, in honor of Ken’s father, a plumber and electrician who is known and loved, Ken says, by nearly everyone in Smyrna. (Ken wanted to surprise the old man, but that proved impossible, because Lee is a member of the road board and had to vote on the proposal.) The road does not yet exist, and at the time of the vote nobody even knew exactly where it would be built, but the board may have felt the need to get it named in a hurry, because some of the people in Rutherford County were suggesting that it ought to be called Pearl Harbor Boulevard.

Japanese industry is becoming a significant presence in Tennessee, thanks at least in part to an energetic sales campaign being conducted by the state government. Nissan, the second Japanese auto maker to come to the U.S. (Honda was first, with a Marysville, Ohio, plant that is beginning preliminary operations this fall), is the twelfth Japanese-owned company to have taken up residence in Tennessee since 1975; the thirteenth will probably be the Bridgestone Tire Company, which is expected to move into an ailing Firestone plant in LaVergne, the town just west of Smyrna. Emissaries from Tennessee—and from nearly every other state in the union—began courting Japanese auto makers in earnest about three years ago, after everyone concerned realized that the manufacturers had to do something to assuage the resentment and protectionist sentiment that were growing in the U.S. and in other countries whose domestic industries were suffering heavy losses to Japanese imports. Local legend has it that the Smyrna site, dairy farmland at the time, was spotted by a Nissan executive from the window of a touring car; it is relatively flat, and underlaid with a limestone bedrock capable of supporting heavy machinery. It is also less than four miles from the interstate highway, and mere yards from a main line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. According to Nissan, it was chosen over similar, competing sites in Georgia because it is more conveniently located: closer to the center of the market and to the port cities of the West Coast, which will forward from Japan about 60 percent of the parts to be assembled at the plant.

Various reasons are offered for Nissan’s apparent determination to locate somewhere in the South. Marvin Runyon, the former Ford executive (a plant start-up specialist) who heads the new Nissan operation, sometimes explains it as a matter of personal preference: the fifty-eight-year-old Texan made it clear to Nissan, before signing on, that he wanted work in the Sun Belt. Some labor leaders take a different view, explaining the decision as a matter of cost control, employee relations, and the southern work force’s traditional antipathy toward organized labor: what Runyon made clear to Nissan, in other words, was that they ought to keep away from the United Auto Workers. Indeed, though he initially feigned indifference toward the UAW’s inevitable attempt to organize the plant, Runyon clearly stated his hope that the union will be kept out. Worse, in the eyes of local labor leaders, he has hired a non-union general contractor to erect the plant. Several hundred union men, mobilized by the Nashville Building and Construction Trades Council, convened at the groundbreaking ceremony, in February of 1981, to demonstrate their pique at this decision. The most passionate of them threw stones, deflated the tires of the plowequipped Datsun pickup that was to move the first scoop of earth, and greeted visiting Nissan executives with shouts of “Go home, Japs!”

Not that Rutherford County has been swept up in a tide of anti-Japanese hysteria; on the contrary, most of the people opposed to the Nissan plant—and they don’t seem to be many—would feel much the same, or worse, if it were owned by Ford or General Motors. When Nissan formally announced its intention to build in Rutherford County, Takashi Ishihara, the president of the parent company, speculated, in what he no doubt considered a tone of cheery optimism, that other auto makers might follow Nissan into the area, and that Middle Tennessee might one day become a “little Detroit” of the Sun Belt. On the same occasion, Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander commented that “for three generations Tennesseans have gone to Detroit to get jobs,” a thought later completed for him by a writer for the Nashville Tennessean: “NOW the children of Detroit will have to come to Tennessee.” That is precisely what the plant’s opponents are afraid of. They are mostly farmers and older people—often both—and to them a native of Detroit would probably seem more a stranger in Rutherford County than would a native of Japan. To their way of thinking, the sort of people who will be attracted by the prospect of Nissan jobs—urbanites, wage earners, factory folk: those people, whatever you want to call them—are not the sort who will quickly get the hang of rural living. Those people arrive in Rutherford County and right away go out and get themselves a couple or three dogs—they figure this is the country thing to do—and before you know it you’ve got packs of ill-mannered canines chasing rabbits through your fields and tramping your soybeans into the ground. Those people attract developers like cows attract flies, and where the developers throw up their condos and subdivisions the land prices go right up out of sight, and property taxes with them, and then those people move in and complain to the board of health about the smell of your pig-feeding operation! Those people don’t buy big pieces of land, so they don’t pay much in property taxes, but acre for acre they produce plenty of children and piles of garbage and more than their share of DUI (“driving under the influence”), and they leave the landowners holding the bill for the extra schoolrooms and sanitation trucks and policemen. Those people don’t even know how to fish a creek without making a mess. Have you ever seen what a half-buried whiskey bottle can do to a $1,000 combine tire? At least the Japanese are clean and polite.

When the Nissan deal was being debated in Rutherford County, one of those who spoke for the farmers and old folks was Homer Gannon, a hog-and-cattle farmer who describes himself as “sixtyfive and trying to retire.” Gannon, whose place is less than ten miles from the plant site, represents his neighbors as a county commissioner, an unpaid elective position he has held for twentyfour years. He studied the tax-break arrangement that helped land Nissan in Rutherford County, and he thinks the auto maker came out of the deal “holding both ends of the rope.” The arrangement, in the form of an industrial revenue bond, attempts to project all the income the county will receive as a direct result of the plant development—mostly property and sales taxes to be paid by new residents—and all the expenses it will incur in providing such things as schoolteachers, roads, and police protection for those new residents; it calls for Nissan to pay, in lieu of regular property taxes, the difference between projected income and expenses, plus a flat “profit” for the county coffers. Nissan’s multimillion-dollar tax saving will supposedly come at no real cost to the county, a proposition that to Homer Gannon sounds suspiciously like a free lunch. Gannon doesn’t believe the figures will work out as nicely in real life as they do in the projected budgets. Even if he believed it, he wouldn’t support the deal. He doesn’t think it’s right: “If small business, which is the very backbone and the very heart of this nation, had had the same break that big industry has had, you wouldn’t see their doors closing today.”

In 1950, before Homer Gannon began his public service, more than 88 percent of Rutherford County’s land was devoted to agriculture. In the late fifties, diverse and relatively light industries began moving in, and by 1978, the last year for which figures are available, the proportion of farmland had decreased to less than 65 percent. What seems to bother Gannon most is his fear that the Nissan plant will tip the county irrevocably into an industrial economy and an urban lifestyle. (According to Rutherford County finance director Randall Matlock, the company’s initial $660 million investment—which includes plant, land, equipment, and such “soft costs” as training and travel expenses—is roughly equal to half the value of all the real property in the county.)

“At one time,” Gannon told me not long ago, sitting on the steps of the county courthouse in Murfreesboro, “Rutherford County was strictly agricultural, and agriculture is still our largest industry. That’s been our heritage, and I’ve been proud of my heritage and our lifestyle, and I hate to give it up worse than anybody. I thought we had a good balance here the last twenty years. I was happy. I know this brings more jobs, yes. There’s more jobs all over the United States created by industry—and there’s more people than ever before walking the street today because of industry having to close its doors, too. This is too many eggs in one basket, as far as I’m concerned. We have no assurance that Nissan is gonna stay here forever. I think we’re gonna have an imbalance here, and whenever you get an imbalance I think you’re gonna end up just like Detroit.” As a motorcycle—a Yamaha or Suzuki, no doubt—roared past the courthouse, Gannon said he was thinking about selling his land and moving farther out, where he could retire in peace. “None of my children are gonna come back and operate a farm,” he said, “and I can’t blame them. They’re making too much money at what they’re doing to operate a farm. And with land values getting up like they are, I can’t continue to operate it. I’m gonna get out.”

HOMER GANNON IS not alone in his distaste for Detroitness—nearly everyone I spoke with in Rutherford County mentioned the Strange City to the North at least once, and no one mentioned it fondly—but when the county commissioners met to vote on the incentive bond, the step that would ultimately welcome Nissan or send it packing, Gannon found himself on the losing end of a 19—2 landslide. The prevailing sentiment in Rutherford County seems to be that growth can be controlled, urban blight can be staved off, and a lot of money can be made in the meantime. The plant, which is scheduled to begin operation in late summer or fall of 1983, will eventually produce about 156,000 trucks a year and employ some 2,650 people. According to the econometric assumptions used to calculate the terms of the incentive bond, more than half of the employees will be residents of Rutherford County, and more than a third of that half will be new residents, requiring housing, services, and retail establishments that are not already there. No official attempt has been made to project the number of additional jobs that will be created in satellite factories, but that number is likely to be considerable, because Nissan will receive component parts according to the “just-in-time” delivery system whereby suppliers accept the burden of inventory upkeep by agreeing to deliver parts on short notice and only as they are needed. (This system originated with Henry Ford, though it first became widely used in Japan.) Thus, for the sake of operational convenience—let alone local public relations—Nissan is seeking suppliers that have manufacturing or distribution facilities in the area; suppliers that do not have such facilities may want to establish them. Hoover Universal, a Michigan-based company that already has three factories in Tennessee, will build a fourth, in Murfreesboro, to supply seats to the Nissan plant; the two assembly lines will communicate by computer, and Hoover will deliver finished seats to Nissan about once every hour. Windshield wipers will come from an already existing Tridon plant in Smyrna. Windows will be made at a Ford Glass plant in Nashville. Added to these and many other ripples emanating from the truck plant is the tantalizing possibility that Nissan may someday establish a car-manufacturing facility next door. The plant currently under construction occupies fewer than seventy acres of ground; Nissan bought about 825 acres.

Compared with the state of the national economy, and especially with the gloom of auto-industry cities in the North, the entrepreneurial giddiness inspired by these events in Rutherford County seems almost perverse. Over a stretch of fourteen days at the end of last May—while, in Michigan, departments of the state government were warned by Governor William Milliken to prepare for a round of layoffs; and legislators fretted over the state’s bond rating, which had just been lowered by Moody’s Investors Service to the worst in the nation; and letters to the editor of the Detroit Free Press lamented the closing of the Ferro Manufacturing Corporation and the impending abandonment of Detroit’s downtown district by Hudson’s department store—the following things happened in Rutherford County: On Thursday, the 27th, up at the north end of Smyrna’s business strip, not far from the new Captain D’s fast-fish house, a grand opening celebration was held at the Smyrna K-Mart, the anchor store in a new shopping center that now also includes a McDonald’s (Smyrna’s first), a Super X drugstore, and a Kroger supermarket. Two days before, a new Duff’s smorgasbord franchise (“all you care to eat” for $4.50) opened near the outskirts of Murfreesboro, while a few miles north, just across Nissan Drive from the rising truck plant, ground was being leveled for the construction of Perimeter Square, a 562,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex. On Sunday, the 23rd, the Murfreesboro News Journal announced that in April, forty-eight new concerns had received licenses to do business in Rutherford County, including a Pittstop Car Wash and the Smyrna Square Jewelry store. On Monday, the 17th, the Commerce Union Bank of Rutherford County opened its Smyrna branch office, and two days later the Murfreesboro and Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce did the same. Meanwhile, another new shopping center was going up out by the Old Nashville Highway, and some of the investors who had gone in on the recently completed efficiency motel—the one just down Enon Springs Road from the new Hardee’s hamburger joint—discussed plans for apartment complexes, movie theaters, a new hospital, perhaps even a bowling alley. On WSVT, Smyrna’s first and only radio station (it had begun broadcasting, quite coincidentally, about six months after the Nissan ground-breaking), such local businesses as Smyrna Texaco, Sara’s Flowers & Gifts, and Klassic Kleaners were discovering the magic of electronic advertising. Out on the woebegone stretch of Route 41 between Murfreesboro and Smyrna—a stretch left to die at the side of the interstate—L. D. Langford, manager of Don’s Kountry Kitchen, made room for a couple of new pool tables, and the redneon “No” glowed outside the Chrisman Motel more steadily than it had for fifteen years.

Much of the commercial energy visible in Rutherford County is being supplied by a group of aggressive, chamber-of-commerce-style Murfreesboro businessmen in their middle and late thirties. Much is also being supplied by Smyrna’s unabashed Mayor Ridley, who is involved financially in the Perimeter Square project, in the radio station, in various housing developments, and in a company that just happened to own 197 of the acres that Nissan bought for its plant site. Ridley, who is not paid to serve as Smyrna’s mayor (though he is given a city car and an expense account, both of which he uses with notorious panache), is a white-haired, red-faced character who barely tops five feet and speaks in what might be called a southern squeak; if he were to be cast in a movie as mayor or sheriff of a small southern town, the director would be lambasted for overstatement and cliché. Ridley is bullish on Rutherford County, and has been, apparently, since he returned a hero from World War II and ran for mayor of Smyrna. To those who complain that he sometimes manages the town as though it were one of his many private businesses, he answers that that is precisely why it is in such good financial shape. He boasts that in his thirty-five years as mayor—while he built streets, sewers, water systems, and other things that help make a community attractive to companies such as Nissan—he has not raised Smyrna’s municipal taxes a penny. “I feel like I picked Smyrna up when it was an old run-down dog somebody left on the side of the road,” he told me. “I think I fed it, and I nurtured it, and I had it vaccinated, and now that dog is becoming more attractive to more people. ... I think everything Sam Ridley has done has been in the best interests of Smyrna. In most cases, it’s also benefited Sam Ridley, but I don’t think you can be as active in business as I have without improving your financial condition.” In the immediate future, Ridley envisions considerable improvement in both his condition and Smyrna’s. In five years, he thinks, the town’s population, which was about 700 when he returned from the war, will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000. Come back in a year, he told me, and you’ll see 400 or 500 new apartments, a few small factories, and perhaps a cosmetically improved Smyrna, with trees and shrubbery and new oldtimey architecture—not just like Williamsburg, but you get the idea. He added that if he remained mayor long enough, he intended to build a new city hall over on the western side of town, something along the lines of the town hall at Disneyland. He didn’t say that he had a name in mind for the building, but he did lead me to understand that it would be one of the first things you’d see as you drove into town off the Sam Ridley Parkway.

CLEARLY, SAM RIDLEY’S vision of Rutherford County is forcing Homer Gannon’s out to pasture. What does not seem so clear—at least not to me—is whether the arrival of Nissan is causing the change or just hurrying it along a bit. While I was in Rutherford County, I encountered a lot of concern, even on the part of those enthusiastic Murfreesboro businessmen, for the rural, agricultural character of the place; nobody wanted to lose it. But I did not see as much evidence of that alleged character as the talk led me to expect, and by the time I left I suspected that it had begun slipping away years before, when nobody was paying much attention. My suspicion was corroborated by a fellow named Thomas Hutchinson, who sees the goings-on in the county from a unique perspective—actually, a variety of perspectives. With his son, recently out of college, Hutchinson farms 1,000 acres of soybeans and wheat just south of Murfreesboro. He has been president of the Rutherford County Farm Bureau since last January, and in that capacity he spoke long and eloquently to me on the farmer’s view of the Nissan deal, covering everything from property taxes to dogs and whiskey bottles. Then, however, he changed hats and commented on the affair from the vantage of a developer. Though he makes all his income from farming, Hutchinson is also on the board of Murfreesboro’s biggest bank, and he has been instrumental in founding and managing the non-profit companies that provide water and electricity to unincorporated areas of Rutherford County. As a supplier of capital and utilities, he feels partly to blame for the commercial and industrial development of the county’s farmland, and as a farmer he regrets it, but if he had it to do all over again, he told me, he’d probably “follow the same tracks.”

“You have to look at the overall picture,” he said. “We are not really an agricultural area. We don’t have the prime agricultural land, like there is in west Tennessee or in the Corn Belt, and we don’t have the production, we don’t have the market, we don’t have the suppliers—the agricultural suppliers—that those areas have; if it wasn’t for our farmers’ co-op here, I don’t know where our farmers would get their supplies. If you can—it won’t take long—just fly over the area in a plane. You’ll be astonished. I’ve lived here all my life, and when I fly over this area and see all the development, I can’t believe it myself. Some still call it a rural, agricultural area, but the people who are saying that just don’t know what an agricultural area is. They’re just wishfully thinking, living in the past, and remembering it like it was.”

Hutchinson suggested that as the changing economics of agriculture leave Rutherford County behind, farmers there should welcome industry, not shun it; his argument was one I’d heard from virtually every Nissan enthusiast I’d met: “All these young people growing up, these college students graduating here”—he nodded in the general direction of Murfreesboro, home of Middle Tennessee State University—“by golly, they need a job somewhere. They can’t make a living farming. You go ask some of those farmers how many of their children are staying on the farm like my son is. I can name you several who were real disappointed; they were hoping their sons were gonna do it, but when they graduated and came back to the farm for a little while and got the real feel of it, they decided to do something else. The most expensive and most dear crop a farmer has is his children, and there’s no way, with farming like it is today, for him to keep all his children on the land and expect them to make a living. Those farmers had better be darned thankful that there are other jobs in the area for their children, so they won’t have to go way off somewhere to an industrial area like Detroit. Really, this is a blessing in disguise.”

—Michael Lenehan

Michael Lenehan is a writer and editor based in Chicago, and a frequent Atlantic contributor.