Reflections From Rust Belt To Rust Belt

Nikita Khrushchev might feel at home in the old steeltown of McKeesport, on the banks of Pennsylvania's Monongahela River. It is one of the few places in today's United States where a visitor might assume he had somehow been transported to one of Russia's industrial wastelands.


The town lies at the end of a desolate stretch of road that passes between a boarded-up hotel and the disused steel plant that used to employ 4, 000 highly paid and skilled workers. The only restaurant in town is a delicatessen with a sign on the window that says "We Take Food Stamps". These are the vouchers that can be exchanged for groceries that are now given to the one in every 10 Americans poor enough to qualify.


Silent and rusting steel plants run almost continuously along the 17 miles of the Monongahela valley that leads to the old industrial city of Pittsburgh. Back in World War II, they used to boast that this strip produced more steel than the rest of world put together. These days, I counted for that are still working.


In 1961, at the 22nd Party Congress, Khrushchev launched the Third Economic Program, which promised the Soviet people that within two decades, they would be producing more industrial goods than the United States. So they did.


By 1984, the Soviet Union produced 80 percent more Steel, 78 percent more cement, 42 percent more oil, 55 percent more fertilizer, more than twice as much pig-iron and six times as much iron ore as the United States. Soviet factories produced five times as many tractors and almost twice as many metal-cutting lathes as their U. S. counterparts.


In 1961, these products embodied the sinews of industrial power, and had the world and its technologies stood still, the Soviet Union would have been its economic giant. The problem was that by the time raw Soviet output overtook the United States, the West had made the transition to a postindustrial world in which the new sinews of wealth were microchips rather than pig-iron, plastic rather than steel, and where conservat in the use of raw materials was becoming more important than crude production.


But just like the old Soviet Union, not every part of the West understood the nature of the industrial revolution under way. In places like McKeesport, where the trade unions still dominate local politics and determine which Democratic congressman will be returned to Congress, that old industrial tradition lingers on.


This may help explain why Congress has been so reluctant to vote for economic aid to the ex-Soviet Union. In the introspection of an election campaign, America is looking to its own needs. In places like McKeesport, it is easy to see why.