#Rust belt americana how to#

Rockefeller didn’t want to pay their prices to move oil products to market. Rockefeller brought the oil refining business to Cleveland to get out of Pennsylvania, because the Pennsylvania state legislature there had given the Pennsylvania railroad overwhelming control over transportation. What creates a region’s economic and entrepreneurial critical mass? It was large because it was diversified in the products it made. A Cleveland Chamber of Commerce president in the 1920s began one of his speeches by saying: “Cleveland is number one in exactly nothing.” And yet at the time, it was maybe the sixth largest city in the country. The most successful sustainable regions always have mixes. So, I’m not sure whether Ohio has an identity crisis or just a very hard struggle to re-orient.Ĭan a single technology drive a region’s economic development or does a region really need to be a mix of industries and manufacturing? But after being sold and resold, a couple of years ago it moved to suburban Atlanta.

#Rust belt americana how to#

The National Cash Register Company in Dayton was once an international model for how to run a company. But for a long time, Dayton was one of the main technical innovation centers for the whole GM system and GM has just been through bankruptcy. If you look at Dayton, on the one hand they’re trying to be a Silicon Valley for sensor technology. In one decade, something like 80,000 steel jobs were lost in Cleveland alone. The real shock came in the 1970s and 1980s. Ohio has been struggling with a major economic re-orientation for 30 years. Is it fair to say that since the early 1980s, Ohio industry has been suffering from an identity crisis?

So, there’s a big Democratic vote as well. It became a great place to get a job if you managed to cross the Atlantic from Poland, Italy or Eastern Europe. But it also developed a very large labor force. Credit: Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OHĭoes Ohio’s importance as an electoral swing state have any relation to its long industrial history?īecause Ohio once had so many entrepreneurs who created so many small businesses, it was the heart of the National Association of Manufacturers and two or three different wings of the Republican Party. Station in East Cleveland, en route to Rockefeller's Forest Hill summer home, 1912. Rockefeller (with cane) escorts sister-in-law Lucy Spelman through. Northeast Ohio had a lot of advantages because it was the point where the railroads fan out to carry goods relatively cheaply to every point from Baltimore to Boston.

The cheapness of the steel made all of that possible. It was also an excellent place from which to ship heavy iron and steel goods to market everything from rail and sheets and tubes of iron and steel for buildings and bridges to was manufactured from those materials including lots of heavy complex goods like motors, engines, transmissions, machine tools, sewing machines, auto parts, agricultural equipment and bicycles. From the 1870s until after World War II, northeastern Ohio was the best place inNorth Americato bring iron and coal together to produce iron and steel. What made Ohio an inventive industrial powerhouse? The goal is to diversify its industries so that rejuvenated auto and steel operations co-exist with the kinds of tech start-ups that made household names out of Redmond, Mountain View and Cupertino.įor perspective, turned to David Hammack, a historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and the co-author of a recently published monograph on the economic and industrial rise and fall of northeastern Ohio. Although parts of northeastern Ohio are now in the throes of a well-publicized heavy industry reboot, the state also has high-tech dreams of digitally-rebranding itself as Rust Belt Chic.