Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania started off as the center of America. Philadelphia was the 13 colonies’ largest city when it hosted the Continental Congress in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was one of the newer colonies, founded 52 years after Massachusetts and 75 years after Virginia. Under the benevolent rule of the Penn family and with its Quaker traditions, Pennsylvania soon became the major settlement in the Middle Colonies. Its tolerance attracted Englishmen of many religious sects and thousands of Germans as well. Bordermen from Scotland, Yorkshire and Northern Ireland crossed the corduroy-like ridges of the Appalachians and settled the mountainous interior where Gen. Edward Braddock had been beaten by the French and Indians not long before. Pennsylvania, in the geometric lines founding father William Penn had obtained from King Charles II, connected two major river systems—the golden triangle where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers joined to form the Ohio, and the wide Delaware estuary, with its thriving commerce and rich hinterland. Philadelphia was, after London and Dublin, the largest Georgian city in the late 18th century, seemingly destined to be the London of America, the metropolis of government and commerce and culture. Pittsburgh was the frontier metropolis, the gateway to the great interior of North America and the fulcrum point of American expansion.

But Philadelphia—and Pennsylvania—failed to hold the central position the founding founders had expected. As part of a political deal, the young nation’s capital was located on a site along the Potomac River rather than on the Delaware. And the railroad built from the Hudson to Lake Erie channeled trade away from Philadelphia to New York. Philadelphia lost its chance to be the nation’s financial capital when Andrew Jackson in righteous rage vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. Philadelphia’s Quaker tradition, tolerant of diversity, was overshadowed in intellectual life by New England’s Puritan tradition, morally stern, angrily intolerant, ready to use the state to impose cultural values from abolition to prohibition. Instead, Pennsylvania became America’s energy and heavy industry capital. The reason was coal. Northeast Pennsylvania was the nation’s primary source of anthracite, the hard coal used for home heating, and western Pennsylvania was laced with bituminous coal, the soft coal used in steel production. Connected with Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh was the center of the nation’s steel industry by 1890.

Immigrants poured in from Europe and from the surrounding hills to work in western Pennsylvania’s mines and factories. Pittsburgh became synonymous with industrial prosperity. In 1900, Pennsylvania was the nation’s second-largest state and growing rapidly. But the boom ended conclusively with the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in parts of Pennsylvania it has never returned. After World War II, both home heating and industry switched away from coal. Even when coal prices boomed in the 1970s, strip mining created relatively few new jobs. Similarly, Pennsylvania steel began its decline three decades ago, when management decided not to keep up with new technology and agreed to big wage and benefit increases with the mistaken confidence they could pass the costs along. Big steel got import quotas as long ago as 1969—Pennsylvania has been a protectionist state since the first Bessemer converter furnaces were lit—but they didn’t create jobs. By the time quotas lapsed in the 1990s, the industry had modernized, but mostly in huge new Indiana mills and in small mini-mills scattered far from the factories that once lined the Monongahela. Only the embers remain, or, the fires: The Red Ash colliery fire, ignited in 1915, burns on beneath the hills above Wilkes-Barre, as do 35 other fires in abandoned coal mines.

The result has been the slowest population growth of any major state: There were 9.6 million Pennsylvanians in 1930, and 12.4 million in 2008. Pennsylvania cast 36 electoral votes for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 21 for Barack Obama in 2008. It had 30 House members, as many as California, in 1960, but now has 19 to California’s 53. People growing up here are as likely to leave as they are to stay, and few outsiders move in. Pennsylvania looks and sounds today like it did in the 1940s, with the significant difference that Pennsylvania in 1940 had lots of young people, while the Pennsylvania of today has the second largest elderly population, after Florida, of any state. In recent years, eastern Pennsylvania has enjoyed a boomlet of refugees from high-tax, adjacent states. From 1990 to 2008, the population of the 19 counties east of the first major Appalachian ridge grew 11% with newcomers pouring in from New York and New Jersey. Marylanders have settled in Lancaster and York counties west of Philadelphia. It has been mainly white-collar growth. In the same period, the population of the 48 counties west of the ridge declined 3%.

Although Pennsylvania started off as the country’s center of government, government has not been central to Pennsylvania for most of its history. During the Civil War, Pennsylvania was the site of the northernmost advance of the Confederate Army, at Carlisle, just north of Gettysburg. For generations afterward, it was the most Republican of the large states, because of Abraham Lincoln and the Union, and because of the steel industry and the high tariff. Its malodorous Republican machines built parties that were not representative of one ethnic segment but had a place for just about everyone. In 1932, Pennsylvania was the only big state that stuck with Republican Herbert Hoover and voted against Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. But then, the political landscape changed. The New Deal, John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers and the CIO industrial union movement, and a series of bloody strikes made industrial Pennsylvania almost as Democratic in the 1930s and 1940s as it had been Republican from the 1860s to the 1920s. Even then, parts of Pennsylvania not heavy with big steel factories and coal mines—the northern tier of counties along the New York border, the central part of the state around Altoona, and the Pennsylvania Dutch country around Lancaster—remained the strongest Republican voting bloc in the East. Philadelphia became a heavily Democratic city, but in the suburban counties, the old Republican machines stayed in control. The result was a pivotal marginal state in presidential elections from the 1950s to the 1990s.

In the 1980s, prosperous eastern Pennsylvania trended Republican and ailing western Pennsylvania trended Democratic. In the 1990s, culturally liberal eastern Pennsylvania trended Democratic and culturally conservative western Pennsylvania trended Republican. The east is larger—metro Philadelphia cast 34% of the state’s votes in 2004 and metro Pittsburgh 24%—and the state has mostly gone its way. Pennsylvania voted Republican for president three times in the 1980s and Democratic for president in the five elections from 1992 to 2008. Metro Philadelphia, which voted 50%-49% for Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988, voted 66%-33% for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. Metro Pittsburgh, which voted 59%-40% for Dukakis, gave Obama only 51%-48%. Similarly, the eastern 19 counties, which voted 54% for George H.W. Bush in 1988, voted 54% against his son in 2004 and 59% for Obama in 2008. The western 48 counties, which voted 52% against Bush Sr. in 1988 and then voted 52% for Bush Jr. in 2004 gave Republican presidential nominee John McCain a 50%-49% victory in 2008. Western Pennsylvania’s slight move to the Republicans was thus more than counterbalanced by eastern Pennsylvania’s move to the Democrats. Eastern Pennsylvania’s share of the statewide vote increased from 53% in 1988 to 58% in 2008.

The persistence of these countervailing trends has given Pennsylvania a balance on cultural issues that is different from any other state’s. In 1986, the state elected a Democratic governor, Robert Casey, who was a strong opponent of abortion rights. In 1994, it elected a pro-abortion rights Republican, Tom Ridge. Then, Democrat Ed Rendell won the 2002 election largely because of his huge margins in his home area of metropolitan Philadelphia. From 1994 to 2006, Pennsylvania had two Republican senators, moderate Arlen Specter and conservative Rick Santorum, whose opposite stands on issues can be illuminated by recognizing that the first is from Philadelphia and the second from Pittsburgh.

In 2006, after Santorum had taken his anti-abortion rights position to un-Pennsylvania-like extremes, national Democrats put up an anti-abortion candidate, Bob Casey Jr., to challenge Santorum. Casey beat him 59%-41%. Democrats also transformed a 12-7 Republican edge in the state’s congressional delegation—the result of a partisan districting plan—into a 12-7 Democratic advantage in 2008. When GOP Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties in 2009, after being threatened in the 2010 primary by a diehard conservative, Pennsylvania had two Democratic senators for the first time (except for two years in the 1940s) since 1856.