“Well, my father came to the factories in Ohio/When he came back from World War II/Now the shipyards are just scrap and garbage/He said, ‘Those big boys accomplished what Hitler couldn’t.”
In 1995, Bruce Springsteen released the song. Youngstowna portrait of the northeast Ohio town that, from the turn of the century to the mid-1970s, was one of the main industrial cities of the so-called Steel Belt and even from all of America. In the Mahoning Valley, along the river of the same name, dozens of steel factories were built, working day and night. The largest of these was Youngstown Sheet and Tube, whose main furnace, Jeanette, never stopped burning and smoking.
In the early 20th century, thousands of immigrants from Europe and other American workers came to Youngstown in search of work, joining the ranks of workers who led some of the most important labor movements in American history. For decades, Youngstown was a symbol of the American working class, casting the vast majority of its votes for the Democratic Party; Since 1972, Mahoning County had given victory to the party’s presidential candidate.
With the relocation of factories, driven by globalization, Youngstown emptied and fell into decline. There was a time when more than 170 thousand people lived there; today they do not reach 60 thousand. Houses that cannot be sold end up abandoned and then demolished by local authorities, leaving a series of empty spaces where grass grows unkempt. In downtown Youngstown, there are currently no high-end restaurants. Fast food Not even a large supermarket chain. The old bars along the railway that connected the factories, where workers gathered for drinks after their shift, are all closed, their windows boarded up or covered with bricks. And, in a city once controlled by the mafia, disbelief in political power is a trait that comes from the past and remains today.
The general feeling is one of “abandonment,” local historian Sean Posey tells the Observer. The “iron heart of America,” he says, “has turned bitter.”
At a 2020 campaign rally in the city, donald trump He promised that he would “bring the city back.” would end up being the winner in Mahoning Valley and surrounding areas, breaking the “Steel City’s” decades-long association with Democrats. Now they will be able to repeat that victory again here on November 5, in the city where the iron rusted and most of the workers left. Those who remain, like Tim Sokoloff, one of the last residents of the working-class Campbell neighborhood, feel abandoned: “This place represented the best of America. “Now it shows what America has become.”
Source: Observadora
