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anger at the text of the prince’s speech to a group of architects assembled in Pittsburgh for a
"Remaking Cities Conference." The conference had been co-sponsored by the Royal Institute of
British Architects. Andrew Carnegie’s dream of reuniting with the mother country was coming
true in the very town most associated with Carnegie’s name. The British have a grand sense of
history, they do.
The assembled architects had been studying the settlements of my valley and recommending
replacement uses for its mills. They proposed conversion of empty steel plants into exhibition halls
for flower shows. At the public hearing, valley residents shouted, "We don’t want flowers, we
want jobs. We want the valley back. This was the steel center of the world." Prince Charles spoke
to the crowd as one might speak to children, just as he might have spoken had Braddock won and
the Revolution never taken place. The upshot was a grand coalition of elites formed to revitalize
the valley. I see a parallel in the formation of the New American Schools Committee—whose
eighteen members counted fifteen corporate CEOs, including the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
Company’s descendant form, RJR Nabisco—announcing revitalization of our schools.
The effort to save Homestead looked like this through the eyes of New York Times labor reporter
Bill Serrin:
In its tragedy Homestead became fashionable.... Homestead was the rage.
There were study groups and committees, historical exhibits, film proposals,
lectures, brown-bag lunches, dinners, economic analyses, historical surveys,
oral histories, a case study of disinvestment and redevelopment plans in the
Monongahela Valley done by the Harvard Business School, architects, city
planners, historians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, social workers,
foundation experts—all these and others became involved.
An echo of the great transformational days when we got factory schooling, the same buzz and
hubbub, fashionable people with their shirt sleeves metaphorically rolled up. Then suddenly the
attention was over. All the paraphernalia of concern resulted in:
Little effort on Homestead or the other steel towns. There never was a plan to
redevelop Homestead. The goal had been to ensure there were no more
protests like the ones earlier in the decade. If there was a master plan it was
death and highways. Homestead would be gone. A highway through the valley
would eliminate even the houses, perhaps obliterate Homestead and the other
steel towns. One more thing...the training programs. They were bullshit.
So here we are. In order to clean the social canvas, a reduction in the maximum levels of maturity
to be allowed grown men and women has been ordered from somewhere. We are to be made and
kept as nervous, whining adolescents. This is a job best begun and ended while we are little
children, hence the kind of schools we have—a governor put on our growth through which we
are denied the understandings needed to escape childhood. Don’t blame schools. Schools only
follow orders. Schoolmen are as grateful as grenadiers to wear a pretty paycheck and be part of
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