Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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Название: Beyond Rust
Автор: Allen Dieterich-Ward
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Техническая литература
Серия: Politics and Culture in Modern America
isbn: 9780812292022
isbn:
Perhaps most fascinating about Afloat on the Ohio was the way the multiple stages of metropolitan Pittsburgh’s history existed simultaneously as part of the region’s social and physical landscape. For all their attention to the urban-industrial development, the travelers also observed “small rustic towns in plenty.” Despite the decline in importance of the rivers as transportation arteries, the cities all had broad wharfs with “steamers … closely packed,” while they frequently met fishermen “setting their nets,” as well as “houseboats, dozens of which we see daily.” That said, the ability to use the rivers as anything other than industrial canals and urban sinks was rapidly fading due to “the appalling havoc which … industries are making with the once beautiful banks of the river.” “Fifty years hence,” Thwaites predicted, if these enterprises multiplied, “the Upper Ohio will roll between continuous banks of clay and iron offal, down to Wheeling and beyond.” This dire vision of a region crippled by the environmental consequences of an extractive economy was already foreshadowed in 1894 in the form of the deserted mining villages the pilgrims passed on their journey—“the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without windows or doors, while the black offal of the pit, covering deep the original beauty of the once green slope, is in turn being veiled with climbing weeds—such is Nature’s haste, when untrammeled, to heal the scars wrought by man.”
As Afloat on the Ohio suggests, the transformation of the Upper Ohio Valley into the Steel Valley resulted in an economy based on a nexus of coal, steel and rail that linked Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Wheeling and their hinterlands in a process of natural resource extraction. Industrial entrepreneurs pioneered the development of the vertically integrated corporation, creating an interconnected system of mammoth steel mills, coking plants, and mines extending from the heavily industrialized river valleys to the mining camps of the region’s mountainous interior. Residents had a common culture shaped by the topography and grounded in a celebration of industrial triumph over nature. The logic of industrial capital reshaped the natural landscape, but so too did the region’s rivers, mineral deposits, and rugged topography structure growth patterns in ways that were unique among the nation’s great manufacturing areas. As a result, each stage in the social evolution of metropolitan Pittsburgh required a cultural reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world.
By 1900 competition for control of the Ohio headwaters had given way to a regional community, with Steubenville and Wheeling on the periphery of the metropolitan core in southwestern Pennsylvania. At the heart of this framework were the mines and mills themselves, which bound together distant areas in a sophisticated production process that resulted both in finished goods and the social inequalities observed by Thwaites. Expanding communities and industrial sites placed heavy demands on the environment, which decreased standards of living even as social reformers faced a fractious administrative and political system often dominated by large industrial corporations. By World War II, a social crisis rooted in increasing economic and environmental problems eventually resulted in a new public-private partnership in Pittsburgh that sought to remake the region both physically and symbolically. Taking the full measure of Pittsburgh’s “Renaissance” first requires exploring the complicated ways in which the economic and political realignments that created the Steel Valley set in place patterns of land use, social interactions, and cultural assumptions that proved difficult to change.
FIGURE 2. Metropolitan Pittsburgh: the Steel Valley.
CHAPTER 1
Building the Region
A cacophony of strange lights, sounds, and smells confronted wide-eyed Valentine “Val” Reuther in 1899 when he stepped off the train in Wheeling, West Virginia. Greeted by his brother Jake at the station, the eighteen-year-old German émigré had just made the trip from his family’s farm in Illinois to seek his fortune in the city. Turn-of-the-century Wheeling, like the rest of the Pittsburgh metropolitan region, was bursting with vitality and Val quickly found quarters in a “very proletarian” boarding house in South Wheeling, an area full of “Germans, Poles, Scandinavians, Yugoslavs, and Irishmen.” He soon started as a laborer at the Riverside Ironworks, located in a nearby industrial suburb, where he worked seventy-two hours a week for $1.50 a day. Through hard work and a personal relationship with the foreman, Reuther climbed his way up the labor ladder, eventually landing a job as a “heater” in the rolling mill and earning ten to twelve dollars for the same twelve-hour shift.1
In 1899, it had been more than 125 years since the Zane family first settled the east bank of the Ohio River as an outpost of the British Empire. Merchants in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Steubenville prospered as western markets expanded, using the river and its tributaries to gather produce and distribute manufactured goods from Europe and the Atlantic seaboard. The railroad had superseded the river as a mode of transportation by the end of the century, but industrial infrastructure merged with the natural landscape and vestiges of a riverine society to foster a common culture shared by residents throughout the region. “The mine, the mills, and the river made a fascinating setting for exploring boys,” recalled Valentine’s son Victor of his youth on the banks of the Ohio. “Calliope organs resounding from the river drew us to the banks to watch the steamers go by, creating great waves with their side or rear paddle wheels. We fished and swam; it was a rite of adolescence for each boy to make it all the way to the other side of the water.”2
Reuther’s story provides an important reminder that the fraught conversion to a post-industrial society that would take place a century later was not the region’s first challenging transition. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the Upper Ohio Valley’s strategic position at the headwaters of the vast Ohio-Mississippi river system made it politically significant and provided access to the economic markets of the western frontier. On the one hand, we can see the beginning of a regional community defined by its rough topography, distance from other metropolitan regions, and orientation to its rivers. On the other hand, Steubenville, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh each vied for control of the headwaters with local boosters touting the advantages of their respective cities in terms of location and access to mineral resources, especially coal. In a pattern that would reemerge, especially after World War II, the success of local communities during this earlier era depended to a large extent on the ability to harness resources on the state level: a factor that further underscores the ways tensions between intra-regional bonds and barriers will matter to the subsequent story.
The expansion of the railroads lessened the area’s importance as a transportation node, but trains also sparked a new industrial phase and eventually attracted investment in manufacturing, especially iron and steel making. By the end of the nineteenth century, the region had evolved into the Steel Valley, which formed the center of heavy industrial manufacturing in the United States. An extensive web of railroads connected the densely settled mill towns of the narrow river valleys with mining camps and villages in the surrounding mountainous countryside. In addition to these economic bonds, residents shared a regional culture shaped by the topography and grounded in a celebration of industrial triumph over nature. This shift had cultural, social and material ramifications as heavy industry replaced a riverine society and Pittsburgh increasingly served as the hub of a complex metropolitan landscape. While Steubenville and Wheeling were drawn into Pittsburgh’s СКАЧАТЬ