Industrialization and Deindustrialization in the Upper Ohio Valley

In September 2009, during the depths of the global recession, world leaders held their third “G-20” summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to discuss responses and reforms to the global monetary and economic system. As a host of the event, United States President Barack Obama chose Pittsburgh for its success in shifting from the fossil fuel, industrial economy of the twentieth century to the high-tech, sustainable economy of the twenty-first. Hosting the meeting was quite a coup for Pittsburgh and, in many ways, fulfilled a vision that was more than fifty years old. Although the city had long been the center of the American steel industry, following World War II, Pittsburgh’s political leaders and business elite made a series of key decisions about investment, infrastructure, and policy that would help ease the rocky transition to what would eventually become known as the “post-industrial economy.” Key urban renewal and transportation projects, environmental reforms, and, most importantly, investments in research and technology helped the city avoid the fate of its Rust Belt counterparts. In many ways, the Pittsburgh of 2016 is a shining example of what the new American city is supposed to be, with two major research universities, historic architecture and charming neighborhoods, and a strong, diverse economy.

But any observer who ventures out into the city’s neighborhoods, and especially into the broader region, will see that the results of this “renaissance” have been mixed. Much of southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, and northern West Virginia never recovered and continues to suffer from the urban decline of the 1960s, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the steel mill closings of the 1980s. That story of grit contrasted with glitter is an important part of recent American history, and it is ably told in both Allen Dieterich-Ward’s Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America and Lou Martin’s Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia. These two books cover similar territory and topics—the rise and fall of heavy industry in the upper Ohio River valley and its attendant social effects—but they do it in such distinctive ways as to be very complementary of each other. One does something new and different, while the other does something traditional in a new and remarkable way. Both are impressive.

Dieterich-Ward focuses on Pittsburgh, but he works to place his story firmly within a regional context, giving significant attention to rural areas, small towns, and satellite cities that exist within Pittsburgh’s orbit. This makes intuitive sense, as the towns and rural areas of the Steel Valley have always had an important and complex relationship with each other, and Dieterich-Ward, a native of the area with deep family roots, culls this local knowledge. But historiographically, he is hunting much bigger game. Since the 1990s, historians of older American cities of the Midwest and Northeast have developed sophisticated case studies for explaining how cities are shaped by suburbanization, industrial decline, racial and political conflicts, and social and economic inequality. But most of these works have focused exclusively on metropolitan areas, particularly the interplay between central cities and suburbia. Dieterich-Ward acknowledges the importance of those relationships, but argues that urban historians need to think broader and adopt a regional perspective. The story of Pittsburgh is about multifarious interactions between cities, suburbs, rural hamlets, mill towns, and satellite cities. “The intensity, complexity, and endurance of Pittsburgh’s relationship with its hinterland,” argues Dieterich-Ward, “requires an approach that synthesizes neighborhood focused histories with a broader regional model that has largely been the province of geographers” (6).

Although the book starts in the late nineteenth century, Dieterich-Ward’s focus is on the second...