In this region, manufacturing now accounts for a smaller percentage of employment than the national average, the result of the steel bust that at one point drove 50,000 people a year, almost all of them Democrats, from this area. Some 227,000 left during the 1980s alone, most of them young. Indeed, one-fifth of all 20-year-olds left Pittsburgh in that period — the rate was higher in Johnstown, 67 miles east, where youth flight hit a third of the population — leaving behind their parents, many of them now deceased.
“The older workforce — the people who didn’t leave — came from an economic era that is very different from now,” said Christopher Briem, regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Urban Research.
That older workforce was reared in an era when generation followed generation, mostly happily and increasingly economically secure, into the mill or the mine. While the commentator and social critic H.L. Mencken was struck in a visit to the area by what he called “the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight,’’ the residents here saw in their towns and along the hills something quite different, and distinctly American: home ownership, economic security, and opportunity.
For just as the acrid smell around Berlin, N.H., in the middle of the 20th century meant there were jobs in the pulp mill, there was money in what the British novelist Anthony Trollope described as “the floating soot which hovered over the house-tops.’’
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