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Last Updated June 22, 2005
In the 1860s, prospectors in the Arrowhead region of the new state of Minnesota, northwest of Lake Superior in the low hills of the Mesabi Range, happened upon the nation's largest veins of iron ore; they moved on, looking for gold. But in the 1880s, Duluth banker George Stone and Philadelphia financier Charlemagne Tower started mining the Iron Range and created the northern end of the lifeline of American heavy industry. South from the Range run rail lines to the port of Duluth, nestled on dramatic bluffs over the always cold and, for long months every winter, frozen waters of Lake Superior--one of the most beautiful settings for a city in North America, and there is similar beauty on the North Shore of Lake Superior for the 150 miles from Duluth to the Canadian border. Duluth was a grain-shipping rival of Chicago and the premier iron ore port. Its city plan was drawn up by Daniel Burnham and its splendid turn-of-the-century buildings still celebrate the triumph of technology and civilization over wilderness and the elements. Millions of tons of ore have been dug out of the Range, loaded into rail cars for the ride to Duluth, and into Great Lakes freighters for shipment to Cleveland, Gary, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Buffalo. For most of the last century, in this land where the Arctic winds blow down over the Canadian Shield's thousands of inland lakes, about 100,000 people have lived on the Iron Range and another 100,000 in Duluth, most of them the products of America's 1880-1924 wave of immigration: Italians, Poles, Serbs and Croats, Jews, Swedes and Finns. In this punishing environment, they worked to the point of exhaustion, built solid houses with staunch central heating and wore layers of warm clothing to survive the winter: it got down to 54 below on the Range in January 2005. Life was rough: The work was hard, the hours long and the pay low. The churches, a separate one for each ethnic group, were the main community institutions. Living conditions improved vastly in the decades of great economic growth after World War II, but life remains rough-hewn today, and there is still economic distress. As iron mines and steel factories got more efficient they needed fewer workers; employment is well below its 1970s peak. As water fills abandoned open-pit mines and factories close and mines are shut down, the Iron Range looks bleaker. Duluth's population was down to 86,000 in 2003, and the Iron Range's was about the same. But all is not moribund. Northwest Airlines, with an $840 million investment from state government in 1993, has built a repair facility in Duluth and a reservations center in the Iron Range. The 2003 energy bill, never passed, included an $800 million loan guarantee for a proposed coal gasification plant in Hoyt Lakes. The port of Duluth still ships large quantities of grain, and in the late 1990s a new taconite and steelmaking factory was built--the first big new plant in more than 20 years. And up in Chisholm in the Range, Cleveland Cliffs, after settling a strike, announced a plant expansion in September 2004, the first one in these parts since the 1970s. There is a Greyhound Museum in Hibbing, where in 1914 an entrepreneur started transporting people in unsaleable open-air Hupmobiles, an enterprise that eventually became the Greyhound Bus Company. People here have made the best of the frozen climate: Nearby Eveleth boasts the world's longest hockey stick, 107 feet long, carved from aspen and aimed at a 700-pound puck; the severe winters of International Falls in Koochiching County have given rise to a cold weather testing industry--this is where automakers test a car's performance under extreme winter conditions. The 8th Congressional District of Minnesota includes Duluth and the Iron Range, plus much of the north woods and lake country to the west and south; it moves all the way south to the boundaries of the Twin Cities metro area, to Isanti and Chisago Counties, where young families are building new homes near pleasant old lakeside towns. While the Iron Range grows only sluggishly, there has been vigorous population growth in the southern and western counties in the district, as young families move out farther from the Twin Cities core and older Minnesotans move farther north to enjoy life on the lakes. This district has been a bulwark of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party since it was formed in 1944, and has been considered safely Democratic for years. But there are signs of change. In 2000, cultural issues like gun control and environmental restrictions here moved opinion toward the Republicans; George W. Bush lost the 8th District to Al Gore by only 49%-44%, a much smaller margin than his father's 60%-40% loss 12 years earlier. Bush campaigned on the Iron Range in July 2004 but the DFL came back some distance: John Kerry won here 53%-46%. The congressman from the 8th District is Jim Oberstar, a Democrat first elected in 1974--"part scholar and part Iron Range street fighter, part pothole-filling ward healer and part workaholic," in the words of St. Paul Pioneer Press. Oberstar grew up in the Iron Range city of Chisholm, where his father was an iron miner and union official, who sent him off to St. Thomas College with $2,500 saved in quarters at the Slovenian National Benefit Society; Oberstar has been known to sing polka songs in Slovenian at a House Democratic retreat. He studied French in college and in Belgium; for four years he was a civilian employee of the U.S. Naval Mission to Haiti, teaching French and Creole to Marines, and French and English to Haitians (he also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian and Spanish). Then, in 1963, at 29, he landed a job as chief of staff to Congressman John Blatnik in Washington: he has been working for the 8th District for more than four decades. When Blatnik retired in 1974, Oberstar won a primary over Tony Perpich, brother of Governor Rudy Perpich. He won tough primaries in 1980 and 1984, the latter after briefly running for the Senate. Oberstar's views are in the liberal Catholic tradition. He believes in an economically active government and has little faith in economic markets. He was long dubious about American military involvement abroad, especially in Central America, but favored the 1994 deployment in Haiti. He voted against the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. He is an opponent of abortion and a backer of adoption, sponsoring bills to insure family and medical leave and dependent deductions for families in the process of adopting; when he first proposed a $1,500 adoption tax deduction in the 1970s he was laughed out of Ways and Means, but now, thanks in large part to his effort, there is a $5,000 tax credit. From this North Country district, Oberstar has been a supporter of local hunting and fishing activities and of the steel industry. When normal trade relations with China came before the House, he tried to get an amendment of the 1974 trade act that would treat steel slab imports as a direct threat to taconite miners; when the administration wasn't interested, he voted against the bill. He was disappointed by George W. Bush's steel tariffs in March 2002, because imported semi-finished slab steel, which competes with Minnesota's taconite, was not subject to the 30% top duty until imports reached 5.4 million tons, 77% of previous levels. But he seeks not just protection but expansion: in July 2003 he brought Minnesota taconite executives to see the new Chinese ambassador to sell taconite pellets to China. Since October 1995, Oberstar has been ranking Democrat on Transportation and Infrastructure--a position of real power, even in a Republican Congress. This committee has a long tradition of bipartisanship, and of sponsoring members' roads (and, since 1994, other transportation) projects; it has 75 members, the largest in the House. For six years Oberstar and Chairman Bud Shuster worked to make it more powerful than ever. Their great monument was the May 1998 TEA-21 transportation bill, with $217 billion in spending, including $10 billion in projects earmarked by members. Back when Oberstar's boss John Blatnik was chairman, the committee's power was threatened by an alliance of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives; by 1998 it was carrying all before it. Another reason: the 1991 ISTEA, of which 1998's TEA-21 was the reauthorization, included spending for mass transit, bicycle trails and pollution control research, at the option of states or House members. This has helped win the support of many liberals; Oberstar himself is a bicycling enthusiast, proud of logging 3,000 miles a year in Washington, Duluth, on the Range and in the Tour de Frog in St. Cloud. One special project is Safe Routes to School, grants for sidewalks, bike paths and safe crossings to encourage kids to walk to school; Oberstar has pushed for another $1 billion over six years and claims that the programs has stimulated states to raise spending on this from $20 million to $750 million. In April 2004 Oberstar and the new Transportation Chairman, Don Young, persuaded the House to pass a $275 billion, six year bill; the Senate in February 2004 passed a $318 billion bill. The White House insisted on capping spending at $256 billion, and the result was that no bill was passed in 2003 and 2004. Oberstar and Young were unfazed. In March 2005 the House passed a $284 billion bill by a vote of 417-9. Oberstar once chaired Transportation's Aviation Subcommittee and remains involved in aviation issues. He worked hard for the state investment in Northwest Airlines, but criticized the company when it cut jobs in Duluth below the agreed on level in early 2004; by December most of the jobs were restored. He was one of the architects of the airline bailout bill in fall 2001 and strongly pushed for federal employees in airport security. When the bill to limit FAA regulation of private spaceflight until 2012 came forward on the last day of the lame duck session in 2004, Oberstar urged caution. But the bill passed 269-120 and passed the Senate a month later. Oberstar's one political setback came in 1984, when he ran for the Senate but was denied endorsement by the liberal DFL convention. In the 8th District he has been re-elected by very wide margins; longtime DFL voters may be moving away from Democrats higher up on the ticket, but they remain faithful to Oberstar.
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