They had steadily fallen behind the state of the art in productivity as well as in controlling emissions. The connection is this: the plants were so dirty and so economically marginal because their owners had not invested in them for decades. Government Policies Can Create and Retain Good Jobs The jobs mainly went to Japan later to Korea and the South. And the mills as well as the auto plants constantly threatened to close, usually as an explicit threat to avoid clean air regulation. Steel mills and other heavy industrial buildings looked like something out of a horror movie: dirty buildings on lots overgrown by weeds, with crumbling parking lots and decaying railroad loading docks. You could get to New York on all of those trains as well you could also go to central and southern Ohio.Ĭleveland was prosperous at the time: it provided the eight-largest industrial job market in America, and offered well-paid factory employment in the steel, machine tools, petroleum refining, and automobile production industries, and had a Great Lakes port as well as an extensive system of freight railroads.īut even as a child, one got the foreboding sense that the end of this prosperity was near. The journey took 7 hours as I recall, the cars were spacious and elegant, and the trains were reliably on time. You had a choice of departures in the morning, around midday, and late afternoon, and I think an overnight train. One company offered 4 daily trips and the other offered two or three. We took trains to Chicago twice or so a year to visit my mother’s family, and there were two competing train services operated by different railroads. Usually we couldn’t even see views of Lake Erie from 4 miles away. The skies were far too polluted for that.
But I never saw it from there: not once in 18 years. It is, as I have subsequently seen, right at the end of the wide street that ran right by our house. We lived 7 miles from the tallest building between New York and Chicago-a 48-story tower that marked the center of downtown and served as the main passenger railroad terminal. All of the big downtown buildings were sooty black, whether they were built of beige stone or red brick.Īnother thing I noticed was in fact something I didn’t notice: views. And we were over 5 miles from the nearest smokestack. I also remember my mother vacuuming frequently-much more than the once every week or two that I do today. I learned to help my mom dust surfaces like interior windowsills, and every day we could see tiny flakes of deep black crud accumulate on all of them, even if we dusted just the day before. Well, one of the places it evidently went was onto any flat surface. All that particulate matter (or the 4-year-old word for it) had to go somewhere. When I was about 4, I noticed the thick black smoke pouring out of the industrial smokestacks I saw on the tram ride downtown, and wondered: where did all that black smoke go? Assurances that it “dissipated” (or whatever the 4-year-old word was) were uncompelling even to a small child. But it was already visibly in decline, and this blog explains some of what went wrong and how we can avoid these mistakes in the future. For the past century, Cleveland had been a high-tech industrial powerhouse. Today, the term Black Belt generally encompasses a stretch of counties from Virginia down through the Deep South and including parts of Texas and Arkansas.The Story Behind the Conclusion: Lack of Regulation Leads to Plant Closings and Economic Loss Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense - that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white." The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. "So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. Washington described the evolution of the Black Belt: That stretch eventually became associated with the slaves who tended to the land, and the term expanded to include the greater region where slavery and cotton farming were widespread. The term originally referred to a specific stretch in central Alabama known for its dark, fertile soil. The Black Belt is a region of the Southern US with a history of slave plantation agriculture and a high African-American population.
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