Beyond Rust - Allen Dieterich-Ward Politics and Culture in Modern America

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declared, the region’s riverbanks were already primarily used as the dumping ground for cinders, slag, and “rubbish of every degree of foulness.” “Sometimes for nearly a mile in length,” he concluded, “the natural bank is deep buried out of sight; and we have from our canoe naught but a dismal wall of rubbish, crowding upon the river to the uttermost limit.”40

      Taken together, the cultural, social, and physical development of the region created an integrated framework that resisted change even as residents faced a series of economic and environmental problems rooted in the very fabric of community life. Even by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Steel Valley exhibited a host of environmental and social problems, which extended from the sewage filled rivers that gave Pittsburgh the nation’s highest rate of typhoid fever to the smoke-belching furnaces that kept many of the region’s communities engulfed in a perpetual twilight. Indeed, the role of heavy industrial corporations in metropolitan Pittsburgh’s economic and political life actually grew after World War I as glass, pottery, cigar making, and other traditional employers began to decline. Whether in the mill towns dominated by large industrial employers, small cities such as Wheeling or Steubenville that proved incapable of overcoming ethnic and class differences, or Pittsburgh of the Magee-Flinn era, however, regional politics generally impeded collective action to remediate these problems. It was not until after the jarring dislocations of the 1930s that a new public-private partnership emerged that held out the promise of urban and regional revitalization.41

      CHAPTER 3

      The Pittsburgh Story

      In late October 1948, an incident in Donora, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, crystalized all that was wrong with the environmental, economic, and political framework that had held sway in the Steel Valley over the previous half century. The massive industrialization and urbanization of the river valleys combined with the steep surrounding escarpments to trap particulates, sulfur dioxide, and other chemicals from burning coal, particularly when cold air prevented the smoke from rising. Donora frequently had problems due to U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works, its American Steel and Wire Plant, and other smaller sources, but the 1948 incident was quite severe—lasting five days, killing twenty residents, and sickening thousands more. “You couldn’t see to step off the curb or to the end of your hand,” recalled Charles Stacey, who was an equipment manager for Donora’s football team in 1948. During the game that week, people and players were sent home from the field early. “One of the players, Stan Sawa, went home and found that his father had died.” For its part, U.S. Steel never acknowledged responsibility for the incident, calling it a “freak weather condition” that trapped “all of the smog coming from the homes, railroads, the steamboats, and the exhaust from automobiles, as well as the effluents from its plants.”1

      Despite an illusion of industrial dominance promulgated by business leaders and residents alike, few mills opened or expanded in the Steel Valley after 1920, while dismally smoky skies and a devastating flood in 1936 contributed to the growing sense of unease. In Pittsburgh itself, the Republican dynasty that had dominated municipal and county politics since the nineteenth century collapsed during the mid-1930s to be replaced by Democratic leadership under David Lawrence. At the same time, real estate assessments in the city declined by more than $250 million between 1938 and 1944 alone. Few corporations, it seemed, were willing to invest in the region’s aging infrastructure, particularly in the growing sectors of chemical production, electronics, automobiles, and consumer goods manufacturing. “At worried board meetings,” reported one magazine article, “there was more and more talk of ‘leaving Pittsburgh,’ and no plans for postwar expansion lay on executive desks.”2

      As a result, the Donora Smog, as it became known, was a moment of truth for civic and political leaders who sought to attract new investment by changing the industrial imagery of the “Smoky City” into that of a modernist “Renaissance City.” Pittsburgh seemed an unlikely candidate for revitalization on such a grand scale, but by the late 1940s a powerful pro-growth consensus had emerged between the Lawrence administration and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which was backed by financier Richard “R. K.” Mellon. The city’s new public-private partnership combined an effective leadership structure with an attention to public relations that made it a national model for postwar urban renewal. At the heart of the Pittsburgh Renaissance was a regional vision for a modernist, functionally divided, and thoroughly engineered landscape that combined air pollution controls, a series of massive dams, and new parks with the construction of a modern highway system, the encouragement of residential suburbs, and the transformation of Pittsburgh’s mixed-use central business district into the high-rise skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle.

      Indeed, thanks to the implementation of its landmark smoke control law, by 1948 the city easily weathered the conditions the caused the Donora Smog without even having to “turn on its downtown streetlights in the daytime.” The real legacy of the Renaissance, however, was more complicated and in key ways reflected a continuation of earlier patterns of political economy and ecology rather than the clean break from the past described by the region’s boosters. After all, the same executives at U.S. Steel and the region’s other industrial corporations who celebrated the blue skies now visible from their offices in the Golden Triangle also depended on profits gained from the ongoing pollution of mill towns like Donora. Similarly, the construction of dams and rural parks relied on the projection of urban political power in much the same way that urban capital had already rearranged rural landscapes in the form of mines and coking ovens. Nevertheless, the clear successes of Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership established a new framework for metropolitan development in the 1950s and 1960s that helped compensate for the continued stagnation of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy even as it privileged new commuter suburbs and select urban neighborhoods.3

      Steel Valley in Crisis

      The economic forces that had drawn German immigrant Valentine Reuther to the Steel Valley were shifting even by the 1920s to growing industrial centers in other areas. When Reuther’s son Walter left for Detroit in 1927, he was making forty-two cents an hour at the Wheeling Corrugating Company. Walter and his friend Leo Hores reached Detroit on the last Saturday in February 1927 and were met by family friends, his brother Victor later recalled. On Sunday they found a boarding house and on Monday afternoon they were hired at Briggs Body Works in Highland Park. Within a few months Walter secured a job as a tool and die maker at Ford Motor Company making $1.05 an hour by using the skills he had gained as an apprentice in Wheeling. While his parents, older brother Ted, and younger sister Christine remained in Wheeling for the rest of their lives, Walter’s two younger brothers soon followed him to Detroit, where they were instrumental in the formation and rise of the United Auto Workers union.4

      The decision of the three Reuther brothers to leave Wheeling highlighted the region’s growing economic and environmental problems. Production in the mills did not falter during the 1920s, but the rate of growth in the heavy manufacturing sector, both nationally and in Pittsburgh, slowed following the boom period of the early twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for the region’s decline from industrial preeminence, including technological change that lessened geographical advantages, increased competition from other areas, and reduced demand for the types of products in which local firms increasingly specialized. The production of steel ingots and castings in southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, rose by over 450 percent between 1890 and 1910, but this rate of increase slowed to only 17 percent during the subsequent two decades. As a percentage of total national production, steel ingot capacity in the four-county Pittsburgh Industrial Area declined from 24.1 to 20.8 percent between 1920 and 1940, while its share of plate glass production collapsed from 54.9 percent in 1928 to 27.2 percent in 1940. One indicator of this loss of competitive advantage during the 1920s was the low growth rate for the total product value added by Pittsburgh manufacturers (6.6 percent) compared to the national average (27.1 percent), the total increase in the 33 largest industrial cities (29.6 percent), and the increases for Cleveland (27.2), Detroit (28.6), and Chicago (52.6). While the expansion of other industries such as window glass, electrical equipment, and food production offset losses in basic manufacturing to an extent, the Steel Valley was clearly losing ground to competitors.5

      The

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