The existence of the city of Pittsburgh began as a geographical inevitability.
On the map of North America, two rivers converge here.
The Monongahela River comes from the south, its current gentle, carrying with it coal from deep within the Appalachian Mountains.
The Allegheny River descends from the north, swift and powerful, bringing timber and iron ore from northern Pennsylvania.
They join to form a mightier waterway, the Ohio River, which from there runs westward into the heartland of America.
This triangular tract of land was a natural strategic chokepoint.
Native Americans hunted here, the French built Fort Duquesne here, and the British seized it and renamed it Fort Pitt.
Its early history was a story of furs, forts, and colonial ambition.
The fate of this land seemed to have been destined from the beginning to be bound up with conflict and conquest.
But the true destiny brought by the rivers was not military, but industrial.
In the mid-nineteenth century, someone discovered the secret of combining this place’s coal with the iron ore of the north.
The name of that secret was steel.
When the flames of the Bessemer process were first ignited on this land, what they spat out was not sparks, but gold.
From then on, Pittsburgh was no longer Fort Pitt. It became the furnace of America.
Andrew Carnegie built his vast steel empire here, and Henry Clay Frick fueled that empire with the blood and sweat of coke workers.
Boat after boat of iron ore flowed downstream, train after train came roaring in laden with coal.
They were thrown into blast furnaces, melted, blended, and tempered at temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees Celsius, until at last they became railroad tracks, bridges, the skeletons of skyscrapers, and the armor of war machines.
From then on, Pittsburgh’s air was filled with the mixed smell of sulfur and metal.
The sound of the city was the thunder of giant hammers striking steel ingots, the roar of molten iron being poured into molds.
By day, thick factory smoke blotted out the sun, turning the sky an eerie orange-yellow.
By night, the flames that erupted when the blast furnaces dumped their slag would light up the entire sky like the gates of hell.
This city defined itself through steel.
Tens of thousands of immigrants were drawn by this hellfire.
Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Irish—they fled the poverty of the Old World and threw themselves into the furnace of the New.
They worked twelve hours a day in conditions of extreme danger, lived in overcrowded workers’ neighborhoods, filtered sulfurous air with their own lungs, and traded their lives for a meager wage.
The gunshots of the Homestead Strike were drowned out by the roar of the blast furnaces. The workers’ blood was merely an insignificant stain added to red-hot steel plates.
Pittsburgh’s glory was built upon the frenzied plundering of natural resources and the brutal exploitation of human labor.
It did not produce refined goods. It produced only the raw material of power.
The two world wars were Pittsburgh’s golden age. It became the “Arsenal of Democracy.”
Every battleship, every tank, every artillery shell in this nation carried steel blood from Pittsburgh.
The city’s power reached its peak.
Its name was bound tightly to the strength of America.
Then, the glory ended.
Because the war ended, and the world changed.
Modern steel mills in Japan and Germany produced better steel at lower cost.
The tide of globalization smashed the trade barriers on which Pittsburgh depended for survival, and the steel industry that had once driven the city’s heart became a bloated, outdated, inefficient giant.
The oil crisis of the 1970s was the first blow; the industrial relocation of the 1980s was the fatal one.
Factories began to shut down one after another.
Those enormous beasts that had once roared day and night fell silent.
The flames of the blast furnaces went out, the conveyor belts stopped turning, and vast factory buildings were abandoned.
Silence settled over the river valleys that had once been filled with clamor.
It was a silence more terrifying than noise.
It meant the end of work, the severing of wages, the death of a way of life.
A wave of unemployment swept through the entire city.
Tens of thousands of workers—men who knew only how to make steel, men who took pride in being steelworkers—suddenly discovered that they had been abandoned by the times.
All their skills had become worthless.
Their pride was crushed to pieces by the cold options on unemployment benefit application forms.
The city’s population began to drain away on a massive scale.
People went south, went west, seeking new opportunities in the Sun Belt.
Those who remained were the elderly who could not leave, and the young who could see no hope.
The “Rust Belt” became the new name for Pittsburgh and its brother cities.
Rust appeared not only on the surfaces of abandoned factories; it spread into every corner of the city, every family, every person’s heart.
Later, the city began its “Renaissance.”
The old economic engine had stalled, and a new one was forcibly ignited.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Carnegie Mellon University became the city’s new pillars.
Medicine and education replaced steel and coal.
New glass-curtain-wall skyscrapers rose downtown, filled with doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, and software engineers.
They were the winners of the new era, bringing the city new tax revenue and new vitality.
Newspapers began to promote the miracle of Pittsburgh’s transformation: it had changed from a filthy industrial city into a modern, livable metropolis with high technology and quality education.
But as soon as you leave the few bright, polished blocks downtown, you can see the other side of this miracle.
Those former workers’ neighborhoods are still trapped in the nightmare of rust.
Shops have closed, houses stand abandoned, and on the streets there are only idle young people and staggering old ones.
Opioids swept through these forgotten corners like a plague.
The previous generation lost its jobs; this generation lost its hope.
The new wealth did not flow to the families that had devoted generations of blood and sweat to this city.
The fuel for the new engine was no longer coal, but the highly educated talent drawn from across the country and even the entire world.
The city was divided by an invisible wall into two worlds.
On one side was the light of the Renaissance; on the other, the darkness of the Rust Belt.
This is Pittsburgh today.
A city built upon geographical inevitability, made glorious by steel, and cursed by steel.
Leo Wallace walked along the streets of Pittsburgh’s South Side.
He had just come out of the library, and that conversation with Roosevelt, that grand revolutionary blueprint, still burned in his mind like a ball of fire.
But at this moment, the cold wind blowing through the streets brought him soberly back to reality.
Beneath his feet was cracked pavement.
The red-brick buildings on both sides of the street had mostly been built a century ago, their walls still bearing the black marks left by the smoke and fire of those days.
Some shop windows were plastered with “For Rent” notices; others had simply been nailed shut with boards.
A family restaurant that had once prospered now had its doors locked tight, with only a faded menu still pasted to the glass, the prices on it belonging to another era.
“Run for mayor of Pittsburgh.”
Leo silently repeated the words in his heart.
Strung together, those words seemed so absurd.
He felt like someone who had just learned to swim, only to be told he had to conquer the sea.
“What should I do?” At last, he could not help asking Roosevelt in his mind. “I don’t even know how to take the first step. Go to city hall and fill out an application form? Or run into the street and shout at pedestrians, ‘Please vote for me’?”
Roosevelt’s voice rang out in his mind.
“Of course not. Politics is not a charge; it is a long war of positions. Before you fire the first shot, you must first dig your trenches, find your soldiers, and identify where the enemy’s firing points are.”
“So what should we do now?” Leo pressed.
“Forget the word ‘campaign,’” Roosevelt instructed. “Right now, you are not a candidate. You are an investigator, a sociologist. You need to reacquaint yourself with this city you think you know so well, and look at it carefully with your own eyes.”
“How do I look?”
“Find people, and listen to them talk.” Roosevelt’s voice became concrete. “Forget those university professors and downtown white-collar workers. Go find the other half of this city—the forgotten half.”
“Where do I find them?”
“Go to that run-down office building of the United Steelworkers and see how many people are still there. Go to the activity station of the veterans’ association and listen to what those young people who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan but can’t find jobs are complaining about.”
“Go to those cash-only neighborhood bars and listen to what the older unemployed workers talk about after they get drunk. Go to the church basements that provide free food for the homeless, and look at the expressions on people’s faces after the food has been handed out.”
“The first thing you need to do, Leo, is shut your mouth, open your ears, and listen. Listen to this city’s pain, its anger, its longing.”
“Before you know what your voters want, every word you say is nonsense.”