PEOPLE, PLACES AND POLITICIANS
Abstract rhetoric doesn’t respond to voters’ real concerns
BRADDOCK, Pa. — For much of the past 300 years, this tiny borough hugging the banks of the Monongahela River has had a frontrow seat for key moments in the formation of the country and in the development of its Industrial Age prosperity.
It was here in the first major battle of the French and Indian War that British Gen. Edward Braddock, tasked with capturing French strongholds, marched with an army of British soldiers, Native American allies and Colonial provincial troops, including a young George Washington.
The battle ended in utter failure for the British Army: The region remained in French hands for three more years; Braddock lost his life; and the North American conflict accelerated into a global war. This set in motion both the career of George Washington and a series of events, beginning with British taxes on the colonies to pay for the war, that led to the American Revolution.
One hundred years later, a Scotsman named Andrew Carnegie began building one of the first Bessemer steel mills in the United States. It featured a new and inexpensive process in which molten pig iron was blasted with air to remove its impurities. Carnegie named the mill the Edgar Thomson Steel Works and hired competent managers to run the place.
What had been a mostly agrarian community was transformed into a thriving and diverse town of immigrants, African-Americans and many others. The cramped housing for unskilled workers was built hastily and close to the mill; nicer homes for skilled workers began dotting the slopes. The mill’s success was built on the backs of those workers: Their blood and sweat builtthe American steel industry.
Joanne Bruno recalls a childhood in the 1950s filled with trips to Braddock Avenue’s vibrant business district filled with dress shops, hotels, grocery stores, barber shops, beauty salons, specialty shops and restaurants. “Even as a young mother in the 60s my friends and I would meet and have coffee,” she said.
Today the mill still stands, and still defines the skyline, but the town is a shadow of what it once was: 18,000 people lived in Braddock when Ms. Bruno was a child; today that number is 1,721.
The exodus began ten years after the end of World War II. People like the Bruno family escaped to the suburbs away from the smog and pollution — and with them went the shops and the restaurants and the bowling alleys.
You can’t lose that many businesses, homes, churches and dreams without taking a significant toll on the soul of the town. Just ask Marcia Crowley, who has both lived and worked here for the past 15 years.
Ms. Crowley, 61, lives above where she works at Al’s Market,
where you can find her cooking, running the lottery and doing just about everything else. She says she wants out: “I’d rather live somewhere, anywhere else.”
Others — who declined to give their names — are lifers who have been here since the “good old days” and are so connected to Braddock that it would be like tearing off a limb to make them leave.
In the coming weeks and months, Braddock will get a good deal of national attention because the two most prominent Democrats running for national office here have either represented the borough or lived here: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who handily beat U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb for the Democratic nomination to U.S. Senate, and state Rep. Summer Lee, who won a harder battle to
win the party’s nomination for the 12th Congressional District.
This marks a unique opportunity for Democrats to tell a story about the forgotten communities in the state. They can also tell it with authority.
Being connected to Braddock may or may not contribute to Mr. Fetterman’s and Ms. Lee’s success in November, but it does allow for the public conversation to be less about politics and more about what the most-forgotten people in the state care about.
Democratic strategist Mike Mikus says when the conversation with voters begins with politics — for both Democratic and Republican candidates — most people get turned off because they just don’t think about life the way the media or politicians do.
Regular people don’t use terms like “climate change” or “social justice” to discuss their community’s problems, Mr. Mikus says; instead, they discuss the problems in front of them. “So, if candidates are talking about the everyday things that impact communities — things like the trap of generational poverty, how easily accessible drugs are to their kids, how crime is destroying their main streets, how gas prices add to their lack of opportunity — then you have their attention,” he said.
Mr. Mikus says people relate to you when you talk about place.
For the reporters who will descend on this borough to write lengthy and stylish think pieces, Braddock is the middle of nowhere; for the people of Braddock, this is their somewhere.
Youngstown State University geography professor emeritus Tom Maraffa explains that one’s sense of place shapes values through culture and the experiences of growing up.
“The lens through which they view the world, the country, problems and potential solutions is colored by the values that arise from a particular place. Identity is partly derived from place,” Mr. Maraffa said. The answer to the question “Who am I?” is in partly shaped by “Where am I from?”
Which is why Braddock, and all the other Braddocks across Pennsylvania, are so important in defining who we are and where we’re going — and perhaps to answering the question, “How can we stop leaving these places behind?”
Mr. Maraffa says if someone has lived in a particular place for their entire life, and their family for generations, the problems of that place
become the most important problems to them: “If a politician does not speak to those problems, they are in effect not speaking to that person. If solutions to problems seem at odds with the values of a place or may even harm a particular place, that solution will be rejected.”
“The trick for a politician is to speak to the importance of place as a frame of reference,” he said. “This has to be done without pandering and saying different things to different audiences at different places, but by recognizing that people will view the message through their experience derived from a particular place.”
Mr. Mikus said in places like Braddock, the dominant values are centered on neighborhood, ethic group and smaller community — something his party has struggled to communicate in recent years, largely because the national party’s messaging has been geared to a coalition of elites, academics and young people whose concerns are often more cultural than communal.
Mr. Maraffa says those types of appeals tend to fall on deaf ears in places like Braddock.
I am old enough to remember a prosperous Braddock Avenue, and to remember watching it slowly decay. The most common thing people who remain here say is, “It didn’t need to be this way.”
Mr. Mikus says maybe, for once, politics will do good by Braddock: “Maybe.”