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Introduction Public Memory and the Legacies of Labor Braddock, Pa.—As Americans wonder just how horrible the economy will become, this tiny steel town offers a perverse message of hope: Things cannot possibly get any worse than they are here. . . . In an earlier era, Braddock was a famed wellspring of industrial might. . . . Immigrants came to work in the mill, and through ceaseless agitation won union representation that enabled their children—helped by the [Carnegie] library on the hill—to achieve a better life. . . . [It is] a town whose story has evolved from building America to making Americans to eating Americans for dinner. —New York Times, February 1, 2009 This portrait appeared on the front page of the nation’s leading newspaper on the day the Pittsburgh Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl championship. The team’s first four victories were achieved in the mid- to late 1970s, as the steel industry was beginning to topple; its other two, ending the 2005 and 2008 seasons , occurred amid the city’s recent revitalization. By their victory in 2009— completing a “six pack”—the team was credited with having preserved the identity of the men in the mills. Over these three decades, “town and team have been forever forged into one,” claimed a reporter for the Patriot-News in the state capital of Harrisburg. “Out of adversity came a resilient and ever-enduring pride. . . . As mills shut down, former steelworkers donned hard hats at Steelers games, rooting on a team that had adopted the town’s tough, no-nonsense work ethic.”1 Downtown Pittsburgh itself is now clean and “bustling,” the article noted. But the collapse of Big Steel in this area three decades ago decimated so much of this region, even towns like Braddock where steelmaking actually continues. 2 Pennsylvania in Public Memory As the American recession worsened in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, journalists frequently used Pittsburgh as a symbol of the nation. In 2008, when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a series of features on the personal impact of the current recession, some of their interview subjects shared hardship tales that stretched back to the 1980s.2 Later that year, as the presidential election neared, the New York Times chose Aliquippa, a town northeast of Pittsburgh that once was home to steel giant Jones and Laughlin, as a barometer of just how desperate working-class white Democrats were in an economic downtown : “Voting for the black man does not come easy to Nick Piroli. . . . To the sound of bowling balls smacking pins, as the bartender in the Fallout Shelter queues up more Buds, this retired steelworker wrestles with this election and his choice.”3 Out-of-work coal miners rallied around the campaign of Republican John McCain, chanting, “We’ve got coal!” in response to his support for “clean coal” technology.4 Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both claimed family ties to Scranton. Scranton, too, is a media symbol of American deindustrialization, though it is used more comically. When an American version of the British television comedy The Office debuted in 2005, its producers located the U.S. counterpart of its “dreary branch office of a fictional paper company,” Dunder Mifflin, in Scranton, a city “whose name never seemed to appear in print without the words ‘hardscrabble former coal-mining town,’” wrote one television critic.5 In a skit re-creating the 2008 vice presidential candidates’ debate, Saturday Night Live comedian Jason Sudeikis, playing Biden, lampooned his working-classroots rhetoric: “I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and that’s as hardscrabble a place as you’re going to find. . . . Nobody, and I mean nobody, but me has ever come out of that place. . . . So don’t be telling me that I’m part of the Washington elite, because I come from the absolute worst place on Earth.”6 Biden himself walked the streets of Scranton, recalling his childhood, for national television news cameras, and Clinton spoke at the local high school about her childhood visits to her father’s family in the area. Her appearance there on the campaign trail, wrote a Times reporter, was meant “to link the values of this gritty region —where her grandfather, descended from Welsh coal miners, raised his family—to her character and especially her perseverance. ‘She’s tough,’ Christopher Doherty, Scranton’s mayor, said in an interview. ‘That’s a real Scranton trait. That’s an anthracite trait.’”7 The entire state of Pennsylvania was a favorite with television...

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