Pennsylvania:
A History of the Commonwealth
edited
by Randall M. Miller and William Pencak
Chapter 7: The Postindustrial Age: 1950-2000
Philip Jenkins
In 1950 travelers through Pennsylvania were still seeing a landscape marked by the familiar industrial stereotypes: the hellish steel mills, the mines and factories, and, hanging over all, the smoke and smog that residents regarded almost with affection as a badge of the state's prosperity. Over the next half-century much of the smoke cleared, but the new cleanliness was far from an unmixed blessing. It was achieved by the loss of many industries that had once given employment to millions of men and women and that over the decades had attracted millions of immigrants to the state. Hardest hit were the regions that at the beginning of the century had marked the frontiers of economic expansion: the boom communities of the anthracite and steel regions. Now that tide receded, leaving behind many deindustrialized valleys and villages like so many abandoned rock-pools cut off from the fleeing ocean. Also severed from their traditional importance were what had been the close-knit communities within the cities, which had been bound together by potent ties of work, religion, and ethnicity.
The new landscapes of prosperity were rather to be found around the older cities, in regions of suburbs and shopping malls, high-technology parks, and interstate highways- landscapes of a sort that had sprung up all over the United States. Although for many it was a time of unimagined prosperity, the second half of the twentieth century was for many other Pennsylvanians a painful and unsettling time. Probably no government could have succeeded in easing the trauma caused by these changes. And yet we must emphasize that the process of deindustrialization was a transition, not a simple calamity. The changes the state under-went were part of a continuing process of economic and social development rather than a death knell.
Crisis in Homestead
The most important single change in Pennsylvania in the sec-ond half of the twentieth century was the decline of the traditional industries, a transformation that was at the heart of the other changes in social, economic, and political life. The scale of the tragedy appears in the steel cities of the Monongahela Valley, where the fate of the Homestead steelworks neatly encapsulates the story of many other heavy industrial plants in Pennsylvania. In the 1950s the city of Homestead was at its height, with 14,000 workers earning good wages at the local plant, and the Steelworkers Local boasted 10,000 members. Local stores flourished on the strength of the strong industrial economy, and the town's Eighth Avenue was a bustling commercial center. But like the other great steelworks, Homestead became increasingly uncompetitive, and even the profitable years of the Vietnam War only postponed the inevitable reckoning. Between 1940 and 1980 the city's resident population fell from 20,000 to 5,100. Worse was to come in the horrible years of the early 1980s. Homestead's open-hearth facility, oh5, closed in 1982, and the works itself followed in 1986. By 1990 the population had contracted to barely 4,000.
Realizing that the "Mon Valley," as it is known, was hovering on the edge of destruc-tion, local grassroots activists now began a community organizing campaign that integrated the contributions of union rank-and-file leaders, ideological radicals, and clergy from local religious denominations. The movement remains a model of its type. These activists struggled to assist the unemployed workers, who faced conditions unparalleled since the years of Herbert Hoover; they also engaged in spectacular protests and stunts, challenging the steel owners in their plush residential areas and even in their churches. Still, the campaign could only delay the deterioration of the steel towns, where long-established businesses and stores were putting up their shutters- leaving downtown Homestead increasingly looking like a ghost town, and Eighth Avenue a commercial graveyard.
The town's physical appearance was made worse by a series of mysterious fires of the sort that affected many decaying towns in Pennsylvania, events that some explained in terms of desperate businesspeople seeking to grab insurance benefits through arson. Even the local paper, the Homestead Daily Messenger, suddenly ceased publication in 1979. With the economic base in ruins, local governments struggled for funds to pay for essential services, and cutbacks hit every area of life, including the schools, the police,and fire services. The steel closings tore the heart out of the community, which had to become accustomed to a long-term culture of chronic unemployment. When in 1992 the city of Homestead commemorated the centenary of the great industrial battle that had done so much to define American industrial conflicts, there was precious little of Homestead left to celebrate. By the end of the 1990s the neighboring community of West Homestead was literally prepared to give up its name, as it hit on the innovative fund-raising device of offering to change its name according to the wishes of the highest bidder or corporate sponsor; and $1 million was suggested as an appropriate purchase price.
Creating the Rust Belt
The disaster that overtook the Mon Valley was all the more shocking because, in historical terms, it came relatively suddenly. In 1950 Pennsylvania's economy was still dominated by heavy industry. Giant corporations employed large armies of workers in vast productive complexes, and Pittsburgh was still in large measure the industrial capital of the United States. In 1951 journalist John Gunther saw Pittsburgh as "Gibraltar," "steel's own citadel: civilization based on industrial aggrandizement reaches here its blackest and most brilliant flower."
Pennsylvania's position was not unchallenged, as some older industries had been weakened between the two world wars by the depletion of natural resources or by the attractions of cheaper nonunion labor forces in other states. By the 1940s both the coal and the textile industries were facing difficulties, and the shift to road transportation steadily eroded the position of the railroads, which fought a desperate political rearguard action against the rival trucking firms. This change was bad news for older rail centers, such as Altoona and Johnstown. Meanwhile, the competing attractions of aircraft and automobiles made it likely that passenger- train service would not last long past the 1960s, or at least not as a profit-making concern.
In a partial offsetting of the losses from deindustrialization, Pennsylvania benefited from newer industries, such as heavy electrical manufacturing. Firms like Westinghouse and General Electric benefited from a cascade of military contracts during World War II, the Korean War, and the defense buildup of the 1950s. In 1950 almost half of U.S. Steel's business was devoted to defense work, as was more than one-third of Westinghouse's. The "Red Scare" raged so fiercely in Pennsylvania in the decade after 1945 precisely because the state's industries were so fundamental to the nation's defense effort, and thus so potentially vulnerable to sabotage. Though the specific products manufactured in the Commonwealth might change over time, there seemed no reason to believe that Pennsylvania would cease to be the economic powerhouse it had been for a century.
Yet the economic picture was becoming increasingly bleak, as Pennsylvania's industries declined in both absolute and relative terms. Between 1947 and 1958, Pennsylvania slipped from second to fifth place among manufacturing states, and it became apparent that the unemployment problem was very different from that of the cyclical depressions and downturns of past eras. Permanent layoffs in the coal, textile, and rail industries were leading to chronic unemployment in some regions. Taking anthracite and bituminous coal together, the number of miners in the state fell from 375,000 in 1914 to 52,000 in 1960, and to only 25,000 by the early 1990s. The industry was already experiencing serious difficulties by the early 1960s, when it was hit hard by new federal measures, including new clean-air legislation, and laws requiring higher health and safety standards, all of which raised production costs. Between 1979 and 1990, Pennsylvania's coal production fell by almost 25 percent. The collapse of the mineral industries was very marked in the anthracite region. The state produced more than 100,000,000 tons of anthracite in 1917, compared with barely 3 million annually by the 1990s. Other types of long-term decline hit the Philadelphia area, which lost two-thirds of its industrial jobs between 1925 and 1975.
Unemployment became a vital political issue for the state. From 1950 through 1962 Pennsylvania recorded unemployment rates that were 50 percent above the national average, and it had the nation's worst unemployment figures-behind only West Virginia. In 1956 Pennsylvania established an Industrial Development Authority to help rescue areas falling into semipermanent crisis, and the Authority did succeed in creating some new jobs. The booming economy of the mid-1960s lessened the crisis for a while-in fact, Governor William Scranton was even boasting in 1966 that the state faced a labor shortage. But the respite was only temporary, as coal employment continued to slide and the railroad industry entered ever-deeper difficulties. In 1958 the legendary Pennsylvania Railroad, once the nation's largest corporation, merged into the Penn Central Corporation, but that enterprise in turn declared bankruptcy in 1970, in the largest business failure in U.S. history up to that point. The nation's rail lines were reorganized into new ventures: Amtrak and Conrail. Corporate realignments were accompanied by drastic cuts in lines and services, and consequent unemployment. Between 1974 and 1982 the rail industry in Pennsylvania shed one-quarter of its work force.
The problems with rail and coal were alarming enough, but in these cases the writing had been on the wall for several decades. In stark contrast, however, was the fate of the steel industry, which had long been the proud symbol of Pennsylvania's economic glory. "Pittsburgh Steel" was a byword for American toughness and resilience. When Steelworkers' Union official Harold J. Ruttenberg was asked "What is steel?" he replied simply "America!" In 1950 the major steel producers were recording the highest sales and profits ever. The following year, U.S. Steel initiated the largest steel expansion project in the nation's history at Morrisville: the Fairless Works. Still, in the early 1970s steel was regularly described as an American success story.
Signs of trouble began to accumulate in the late 1950s. The steel industry was hit hard by ruinous strikes in 1952 and 1959-60; the latter costing $6 billion in lost wages and production, and putting 200,000 Pennsylvanians out of work. American steel companies thought they were doing so well that they could ride out these disasters, and that they could afford to ignore a troubling amount of inefficiency and poor quality-control, aggravated by overstaffing, absenteeism, and theft. Gradually, though, these problems became more and more severe, at a time when other nations were investing in leaner and far more modern plants and were fighting hard to win export markets. These international rivals succeeded partly because they were starting from ground zero, having had their older industries destroyed in war, like Japan, or else were in the initial stages of industrialization, like Brazil and South Korea. These rival industries had new plants operating under innovative management and labor practices and did not suffer from the American burden of old habits, tradition, and the associated complacency.
From 1963 onward, Pennsylvania's steel industry began a period of sharp contraction, and by the 1970s the state's steel manufacturers and unions were allying to call for protective tariffs in order to save their industry. Though protectionism had long been the economic gospel for Pennsylvania's industrialists, in earlier days it had been justified by the need to defend fledgling industries. Now, however, the sense was that the American industry was frail, aging, and perhaps on the verge of extinction. By 1979 U.S. Steel was suffering massive losses (in 1980 the corporation lost $561 million in a single quarter). Major cutbacks and layoffs began in earnest, at legendary works like Youngstown and Homestead. By 1983 the cuts extended to such heroic names of Pennsylvania industry as McKeesport, Clairton, Braddock, and Duquesne. In the Pittsburgh area as a whole, the number of steelworkers fell from 90,000 in 1980 to only 44,000 by 1984. Wars have caused less economic damage than this.
By the 1970s the state had become decisively part of the "rust belt," characterized by decayed factories and mills surrounded by the remains of communities like Homestead, which had been called into existence to supply labor for those plants and thus lost their reason to exist. Pennsylvania's manufacturing sector recorded its highest level of employment ever in 1969, at 1.58 million workers, but by the early 1990s that figure had fallen by 40 percent, to less than one million. To put this in perspective, by the end of the century fewer Pennsylvanians were working in manufacturing than at any time since the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Again indicating the parlous nature of the 1980s, the state lost one-quarter of its manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 1989 alone. Gibraltar had crumbled.
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© 2002 The Penn State University