THE PAST, AND THE FUTURE, OF PITTSBURGH’S DISTINCT POLITICS
At a rally on October 9 on the edge of the Delaware River, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate John Fetterman pointed at New Jersey and called it “the land of Oz.” He asked the crowd, “If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, how can you fight for Pennsylvania?”
It’s an appeal to principle, but also an appeal to parochialism that prioritizes state character and custom over toeing the party line. This political ethos, which emphasizes practical matters such as hard work over abstract principles, has defined western Pennsylvania for at least the last century and a half. Its roots, however, are in Europe, and in the memories many Pittsburghers today still carry from their families’ past, and their politics.
At the turn of the 20th century, the collapse of European empires and rise of industry brought a new wave of immigrants to American shores. Many of them settled across Pennsylvania and made Pittsburgh the industrial capital of the United States.
Refracted through their common experience of subjugation in Europe and hard work in America, these fledgling nationalities formed a strong political identity. In particular, the ItalianAmerican experience in Pittsburgh illustrates how this provincial pride came to be and has been passed down to the present.
At a time when partisan politics threaten to overwhelm the Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania way of life, we must remember where our values come from to know why they’re worth preserving.
Provincial origins
Foreign powers ruled the Italian boot for centuries, divvying up the “post-feudal” regional states, explained Heinz History Center historian Melissa Marinaro. A relic of the medieval era, most Italians worked the land that was owned by nobles. According to family lore, Ms. Marinaro’s great-great-grandfather was a “gentleman farmer,” overseeing the work on the landlord’s properties in the mountainous region of Campagnia
in Southern Italy.
Expressing the feelings of Italians across the peninsula, but especially Southern Italy, Ms. Marinaro said, “They wanted land. What was massively appealing to them about coming to the United States was the opportunity to have land. They were always working it but didn’t own it.”
When nationalists unified Italy in 1861 promising liberty and equality, the new government, dominated by northern industrial elites, exploited the agricultural south, worsening the economic situation just as famine, cholera and natural disasters struck. With no standardized language or education system to unify them, many Italians continued to identify with their local community and region rather than the nation. This is called campanilismo, or belonging to what is in earshot of the bell tower.
Italian immigrants brought this regional worldview to America, visible in the way they settled Pittsburgh. They preferred to marry those from their town or village. “Even interregional marriages could be problematic,” Ms. Marinaro noted.
Pennsylvania Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa said, “I’m half Neapolitan, part Calabrese.” As the story goes, his father dragged his mother across the Larimer Avenue Bridge from what is now Lincoln-Lemington to East Liberty to marry her.
“It was a big deal when you came over the bridge and you married somebody from the other side,” he said, “like it was a different side of the world, right?”
These regional prejudices may seem quaint to our modern eyes, but they originated in thwarting far-away powers who prevented Italians from prospering on their own land.
Pittsburgh was literally on the other side of the world from the home country, and Italians had put aside their regional worldview for the economic opportunity to work in the United States. But the same force would gradually transform regional preferences into a common pride in the Pittsburgh work ethic, preserving these prejudices in a new form.
They came to work
After the Civil War, places like Pittsburgh needed laborers to work the proliferating factories, railroads and mines. In 1875, Andrew Carnegie opened the first steel mill in Braddock. By 1910, Pittsburgh produced up to half of the nation’s steel.
If Italians didn’t come on their own to work in Pittsburgh, they were recruited. That’s how Ms. Marinaro’s family ended up here. In 1893, a recruiting agent asked her greatgrandfather’s brother in Naples, “Do you want to come to America? Do you have brothers?” The six brothers were sent to Big Soldier in Jefferson County to work off their free passage in the coal mines.
Ms. Marinaro noted that Italians “were very adaptable and open to any labor because of the shortages they experienced in their homelands. They were happy to have any opportunity.”
This willingness to work, no matter how grueling the job, formed the basis of the Pittsburgh work ethic. Even as immigrants moved up the socioeconomic ladder, they passed it onto their kids.
Dominic Mineo, owner of the Mineo’s Pizza Houses, said his father came to Pittsburgh from Sicily to better himself after the Second World War. Fascism was defeated, but the Italian economy was in shambles.
Mr. Mineo said, “There was an opportunity for people to come and work hard. Unfortunately in Europe where they were, whether you worked hard or you didn’t work hard, it was a much harder time to be successful and earn money.”
Saving money from hawking fruits and produce for his father-in-law and working on the railroad, Mr. Mineo’s father took a risk and opened his first pizza shop in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. The family business flourished.
Growing up, Mr. Mineo recalled, “We didn’t struggle a lot, but he [raised us] to make sure we were appreciative of what we had.”
As he counted a wad of cash in the office of the newly opened Mineo’s in Allison Park, Mr. Mineo added, “That’s what he taught us: to work hard, save your money, and you will be successful some day and be able to take care of yourself and get what you want in life.”
That hard work pays off became the story of all the immigrants groups that came to Pittsburgh in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The opportunity to make a living also attracted immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Starving in the post-feudal economies of imperial Europe, ethnic groups became nationally conscious as a way to take politics into their own hands. Rather than hunker down in the regional loyalties of campanilismo,this nationalism would shatter the fragile empires of Europe into the many nation-states we see today. Before this could take place, many immigrated to Pittsburgh for work, foreshadowing the balkanization of Europe in the way they settled.
Whereas region and nationality divided these groups in Europe, a shared commitment to hard work smoothed over their differences as they formed a common political culture in Pittsburgh. Like Italians, Central and Eastern European immigrants came to value hard work through laboring in industry and starting small businesses.
Mr. Costa said, “There’s a lot of pride in the work that we do here,” which came from “the challenges of the initial immigrants,” working their way up, paying their way. “The next generation and the next generation, they continued to build on that.”
In America, as opposed to the more rigid economic systems back home, the dream of prosperity and, importantly, land ownership was possible through work. Passing this lesson onto their children, pride in the Pittsburgh work ethic meant holding onto what they had fought for and long been denied. And this was soon expressed at the ballot box.
The politics of work
Mr. Costa said his family was involved in politics from the beginning. Arriving from Calabria in 1910, his grandfather, Joseph, laid rail and helped Italian immigrants find work in Pittsburgh, serving the business and community. His son, Mr. Costa’s father, Jay, would serve as county treasurer “helping people find work,” after opening a grocery store with his brothers. Running errands for the store as a boy, Mr. Costa followed his father’s footsteps and became state senator in 1996.
They were Democrats because that was the party of labor. After FDR’s public works programs during the Great Depression, Mr. Costa said, “We shifted from a Republican city to a Democratic city,” eventually becoming “overwhelmingly Democratic.”
However, a number of voters in western Pennsylvania have switched parties as they feel the Democratic Party is no longer aligned with hard work. Even though many of them have ascended into the middle class and beyond, they’ve held onto working-class politics as the children of immigrants.
A longtime Democrat like his father, Mr. Mineo shared he’s “not thrilled with the way things are,” nor is he sure which party is closer to the values he grew up with.
Mr. Costa has seen voters leave the party over the last two decades because they “resent people who aren’t working hard and who are receiving things that they feel aren’t appropriate.” He saw it play out this summer with President Biden’s forgiveness of student loans, angering many of those who had already paid off their own.
Though he didn’t go to college himself, Mr. Mineo said, “I was never raised with the value of sitting on my bum, and somebody handed me money.” He felt that the Democratic Party’s focus on college was leaving the trades and other traditional work of Pittsburgh in the dust.
David Caliguiri, son of the city’s first Italian-American mayor, Richard, called this understanding of student loan forgiveness a “complete misconception,” noting he has friends whose student debt is larger than their mortgage. “The price of tuition now is insane,” he said, “as someone who just went through that.”
Mr. Caliguiri is the founder of the Caliguiri Group, a political consulting firm. He explained, “The idea of what education is and what a job is is changing, and Pittsburghers don’t necessarily embrace change very well.”
Understanding the conservative politics of hard work made Richard Caliguiri a pragmatic Democratic mayor. When steel and other industries abandoned the city in the 1980s, “My father saw that as an opportunity to work with the Allegheny Conference,” Mr. Caliguiri said. His father’s Renaissance II public-private partnerships saved the city from becoming a ghost town, paving the way for the rise of ‘ed’s and meds.’
Growing up in the “very working-class Italian neighborhood” of Greenfield and working in the Parks Department gave him the workingclass credentials to usher in this change.
Ms. Marinaro recalled a bipartisan reelection campaign: “Republicans want to keep Caliguiri
in office.”
Pittsburgh’s political culture has kept the city’s Democrats more pragmatic and conservative than other parts of the country. Though he supported erasing some student debt, David Caliguiri didn’t support free college. “It helps if you have some skin in the game,” he said. “That’s pretty much a traditional southern Pennsylvania work ethic,” he added, having mowed lawns in richer Squirrel Hill in his youth.
The city’s history of European immigrants working their way up gave them a provincial pride in their work ethic, replacing the regional and national loyalties they brought from the Old Country. Imbibed by their children, this pride continues to define the working-class politics of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, even as party affiliations have drifted.
John Fetterman’s appeal rests on marrying new Democratic ideas to an old Democratic identity: progressive values and a working-class aesthetic. In this way, he aims to be the modern heir to the Caliguiri legacy, moving the region forward within its own political traditions. Indeed, his unique candidacy may serve as a bellwether for whether Democrats can regain the support of the ‘white working class.’
As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote about Italian unification, “Everything must change for everything to remain the same.”