Kontextmaschine

18th September 2016

Question with 35 notes

Anonymous asked: Explain why Pennsylvania was horsewhipped and was falling part? How high Iof a chance a new state would be created out of it?

(re:)

Well a lot of it was Pennsylvania is the keystone (Pennsylvania humor!) of the Rust Belt - where iron meets coal to make steel, which was the purpose of Pittsburgh and the whole SW corner of the state, plus Allentown and the Lehigh Valley in the east. Anthracite mines to feed the steel plants, the Great Lakes manufacturing complex the plants fed in turn.

There’s that, and then there’s farmland - not the best soil or access, and too hilly to improve much but hey it’s a sure thing the great eastern metropolises HAVE to grow nearby for freshness, right, right, right? (The Amish and Mennonites have actually been expanding their holdings recently tho, the land works just fine for their needs.)

Then finally there’s Philadelphia, which was there because it commanded the Delaware and thus the Delaware Water Gap past the Appalachians, which hasn’t mattered since the Erie Canal and railroads, and at this point is mostly there because Philadelphia was there. White flight, black crime, the underlying fundamentals that “five-story brick buildings in proximity to rail spurs, non-containerized docks, and dense labor-identifying neighborhoods” was no longer an appealing industrial model. At least it still had some finance and culture and tourist and professional stuff to hold onto, Camden and Trenton across the river in Jersey became - and as far as I can tell still are - absolute hellpits.

Course a big swath of the center of the state is the northern edge of Appalachia, which has always meant marginal farmland, rough coalfields, and poverty in the best of times.

And so, piece by piece, all of that fell apart in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and it just never came back again. (The state’s federal representatives were pretty agile at propping it up with pork - rural parts of the state are famous for their constant road work and John Murtha in charge of defense appropriations did a lot, but then the end of the Cold War, the parties changed and committees were leashed in the Republican Revolution of 1994, and BRAC deliberately took the draw-down out of legislators’ hands).

Now you hear happy talk about building a new economy on services, medicine, education, research. What this means is the eastern flank of the state is becoming a bedroom community for New York down to DC (mostly providing the services of comparatively low taxes and reliably white classmates) while the rest of the population is left to age and die in place while their kids go to nursing school to change their bedpans.

If you’ve got your shit together you can become a teacher, or a cop, or an addiction counselor. If you’ve got it especially together you can become their supervisor or trainer! (If you don’t, you can become their client.)

If you live by the Marcellus Shale you can get into fracking, if you don’t mind your tapwater catching fire (ha, like you’ve got a choice).

If you live in Philly and have some connections and you’re into that thing you can get in on the great white Urban Renaissance, all the long hard work of repressing the negroes finally paying off (long before Giuliani Time there was Frank Rizzo and Ed Rendell).

If you’re the ambitious type, probably you leave.

But there’s always Penn State football.

Tagged: pennsylvaniageographyamhist