Men of steel: social class, masculinity, and cultural citizenship in post-industrial Pittsburgh

Abstract

The Pittsburgh Steelers serve as a critical space for the celebration of masculinity and working-class identity in the context of (post-)industrial America. Within this article, the authors chronicle the transformation of a city, a region, and a group of people, at once steeped in the hard life of steel production and factory work, now increasingly replaced by non-physical work and suburban lifestyle of the informational economy. As in the decades before, today's Steelers certainly operate as a symbolic reminder of the region's identity, framed around the hard work of factory life and industrial manufacturing. We investigate how the mediated celebrity identities of three contemporary Pittsburgh Steelers – Ben Roethlisberger, James ‘The Hitman’ Harrison, and Troy Polamalu (each in his own way) – are mobilized to frame cultural citizenship in post-industrial Pittsburgh. We conclude by suggesting that the violence propagated by their bodies on (and sometimes off) the football field symbolically articulates with the ‘hard men’ and working-class life of Pittsburgh's past.

Notes

^1.Reft, ‘Steel Dreams’, para. 4.

^2. Jim Russell, a western Pennsylvania-born geographer who studies geopolitics and the relation between migration and economic development. Quoted in Thompson, ‘Displaced Steelers Fans’, para. 30.

^3. According to the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area reached an all-time high of 17% in 1982. By way of comparison, the nationwide unemployment rate at that same time was approximately 10%.

^4. According to US Census data, Pittsburgh's population decreased from an all-time high of 669,817 in 1930 to 423,938 in 1980, to 305,704 in 2010 (which was the population of Pittsburgh c. 1895–1900). This substantial decline in population is similarly mirrored in other industrial cities across the same time frame (e.g. Cleveland's population went from 900,000 in 1930 to roughly 400,000 in 2010; Detroit's went from 1.5 million in 1930 to 700,000 in 2010; Buffalo's went from 573,000 in 1930 to 261,000 in 2010).

^5.Stevens, ‘Pittsburgh Bemused’, 21.

^6.Millman and Coyne, Ones Who Hit, 15.

^7. See Drucker, Age of Discontinuity.

^8.Wexell, Pittsburgh Steelers, 1. This is quite an overstated claim in the age of ‘NASCAR Nation’. See, for example, Newman and Giardina, Sport, Spectacle and NASCAR Nation.

^9.Ong, ‘Cultural Citizenship’.

^10. Ibid., 738.

^11.Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, 37.

^12.Thompson, Making of the English.

^13. Ibid., 9.

^14. Ibid., 8.

^15.Williams, Country and the City.

^16.Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century.

^17. The city's rise as a manufacturing centre was advantaged by its natural resources and geographic location. The entire south-west Pennsylvania region was built, quite literally, on coal. Thick slabs of coal protruded from the sides of the hills surrounding the city. For much of the nineteenth century, coal was used as an inexpensive fuel to heat homes and power transportation, and to run small workshops. The city also served as a main transportation hub for rivers and railroads and expedited the transport of materials to Pittsburgh's mills and the distribution of finished goods to the market. With its geologic and geographic fortunes, Pittsburgh became the manufacturing capital of industrial America. By the 1830s, Pittsburgh had already become the glass production capital of America as it began fulfilling rising western demands for glass, especially windows. By 1860, the city's mills had become the nation's leading producer of iron.

^18.Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh.

^19. Central to the production of iron and glass was the puddling, a necessary process involving the conversion of brittle pig iron into its more malleable and more perfect form. Puddling epitomized the sort of work done in the mills; it required an equal measure of skill, stamina, strength, and years of know-how. Although factory owners tried to mechanize the puddling process, nobody could replace the enormous amount of hard labour and judgement that were a vital part of the production process. Puddling could not simply be broken down into subordinate tasks as it involved the work of a single person from beginning to end. This irreplaceable skill gave the industrial craftsman of Pittsburgh considerable agency over the ownership and the regimentation of mechanized production. In a milieu when common labour earned little more than a dollar an hour, a craftsman earned as much as 2 to 10 times that amount. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh.

^20.Slavishak, Bodies of Work, 18.

^21. Millman and Coyne, Ones Who Hit, 19.

^22.Heron, Working in Steel, 50.

^23. During that five-decade period, the population of Pittsburgh tripled, with immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe or from the Mediterranean accounting for much of this dramatic increase. Of Pittsburgh's 530,000 residents in 1910, 140,000 (26.4%) were foreign-born. Factoring in those American-born persons of foreign parentage reflects more clearly the impact of immigration on the city's growth: 62.5% of Pittsburgh's population was either first- or second-generation Americans.

^24. The city also served as an integral part of the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II, providing steel, aluminium, ammunition, and machinery to support the Allies war efforts, including government-financed research and development, cost-plus military procurement contracts, and, after the war, demand for equipment to help revolutionize technologies of transport and communication.

^25. The ‘Great Compression’ following World War II was primarily the result of the rise of union membership and power, raising average wages and reducing the gap between blue-collar work and higher-paid occupations and management. Workers were far better off in the 1950s than at any point prior in US history and created a middle-class society revolving around Pittsburgh's mills and factories. Krugman, Conscience of a Liberal.

^26. See Cagan and Vogel, Creating Breakthrough Products.

^27. This does not simply suggest that corporate managers are reluctant to invest, but only that they prefer to purchase and acquire other companies to increase its capital stock, and refuse to invest in basic industries.

^28.Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization of America.

^29.Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers, 254.

^30.Bluestone and Harrison, Deindustrialization of America.

^31.Plushnick-Masti, ‘After 250 Years’.

^32. Indeed, the largest employers in the Pittsburgh of today are as follows: the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (47,000 employees); the University of Pittsburgh (11,000 employees); West Penn Allegheny Health System (11,000 employees); Giant Eagle supermarkets (10,000 employees); PNC Financial Services (8000 employees); Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (6900 employees); FedEx (5000 employees); Highmark insurance (5000 employees); and Carnegie Mellon University (4700 employees). US Steel, which once employed as many as 340,000 workers during World War II, currently employs roughly 5000 workers in Pittsburgh (out of its 42,000 global employees).

^33.David Harvey explains that this shifting territorial logic – of a move towards a more ephemeral knowledge economy – ‘is about trying to maintain the health and well-being of a particular space in the face of [the] capillary movement of capital moving left, right, and center, and everywhere’. He continues: ‘If the steel industry is collapsing and the shipbuilding is collapsing, what does somebody who is in charge of the territorial logic do? You say, “Well, maybe it's convention centers and the convention business. Maybe it's museums. Maybe it's tourism, or something of that kind”. So the territorial logic is very much about trying to maintain the health and well-being of a particular place and space within this notion, which is very hard for anybody to control because capitalists decide they're going to take their money from here and put it there’ (Harvey, ‘Conversation with David Harvey’, n.p.).

^34. Millman and Coyne, Ones Who Hit, back cover. In their book, Millman and Coyne juxtapose the Steelers’ blue-collar, physical style of play with the cosmopolitanism of the Dallas Cowboys in a competition for America's Hearts in the 1970s. The Cowboys, with their shiny uniforms, beautiful cheerleaders, and trickery on offence reflected the slick, new money ways of the Texas oilfields.

^35. Quoted in Jubera, ‘Roethlisberger's Road to Redemption’, 3.

^36. Thompson, ‘Displaced Steelers Fans’, para. 28.

^37.Anderson, Imagined Community.

^38. Quoted in Steelers Nation.

^39. Quoted in ibid. This is true even in smaller cities, such as Tallahassee, FL (with a population of ∼180,000, making it the 128th largest city in the country), where two of the three authors of this article reside. Here, the Steelers bar of choice is called Ray's Steel City Saloon. The website www.steelersbars.com has indexed 714 bars in the USA catering to Steelers fans (though not all of them are, strictly speaking, of the ‘Pittsburgh’ genre).

^40. We thank Justin Lovich for suggesting this phrase and for conversation related to Pittsburgh.

^41.Leitch, God Save the Fan, 32.

^42. Ibid., 35.

^43. See Shelton, ‘Today is Big Ben's’.

^44.Leitch, ‘It's Good to Be Ben’.

^45. On June 12, 2006, Roethlisberger crashed his motorcycle (a Suzuki Hayabusa, called the ‘fastest production bike on the planet’) in downtown Pittsburgh, sustaining multiple injuries that resulted in a broken jaw, broken nose, and cracked skull. He was not wearing a helmet and had made previous declarations about riding without one because ‘You're just more free when you're out there with no helmet on’. Quoted in Myers, ‘Blow to Big Ben’, para. 9. Fans gathered at his hospital for a makeshift vigil following his accident.

^46.Maske, ‘Roethlisberger is a Man’.

^47. Quoted in McCarthy, ‘Steelers Sure to Enjoy’, 4C. Media coverage of Roethlisberger continually portrays him in such a light, with common headlines reading ‘Steelers march on behind gritty Roethlisberger’ (Graves, ‘Steelers March’); ‘Roethlisberger's style: Tough as Steel’ (Forgrave, ‘Roethlisberger's Style’); ‘Roethlisberger adds to his tough-guy legend in Steelers victory’ (NFL.com Wire Reports, ‘Roethlisberger Adds to His Tough-guy Legend in Steelers Victory’, December 9, 2011, http://m.nfl.com/news/09000d5d824e1549/roethlisberger-adds-to-his-toughguy-legend-in-steelers-victory/).

^48. See Schapiro, ‘Big Ben Sex Suit’.

^49.Rosenthal, ‘Complaint Gets Very Specific’.

^50. See Lupica, ‘Truth and Lies’, 51.

^51.Florio, ‘Roethlisberger Case Settled’.

^52. The victim's account is included in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's 572-page report of the incident, portions of which are available on The Smoking Gun website at http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/ben-roethlisbergers-bad-play. In the course of the investigation, it was learned of another woman who alleged that Roethlisberger ‘pulled down his pants in front of a young woman and forcefully put his hand up her skirt.’ The woman declined to press charges.

^53.National Football League, ‘Goodell Suspends Roethlisberger’. Such a suspension from Goodell, effectively under the auspices of the ‘NFL Personal Conduct Policy’, was not without precedent: Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones was suspended for the entire 2007 season after numerous off-field infractions involving felony and misdemeanour charges; Tank Johnson was suspended for eight games of the 2007 season for unregistered firearms possession and other legal infractions; Michael Vick was suspended for several games after serving a prison sentence for his role in a dog-fighting ring; and Donte Stallworth was suspended for the 2009 season after pleading guilty to DUI manslaughter charges.

^54. See Connell, Gender.

^55.Sabo and Runfola, Jock, xiii. See also Crosset, Benedict, and McDonald, ‘Male Student-Athletes’; and Welch, ‘Violence against Women’.

^56.Cole and Denny, ‘Visualizing Deviance’, 128.

^57. Ibid.

^58.Coleman, ‘Tucker Max, “Fratire”’; and Friedman, ‘Tucker Max Has Female Fans’.

^59. Max's most popular book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was a New York Times #1 bestseller and made its Best Seller List each year from 2006 to 2011.

^60. ‘Rape culture: What is Rape Culture?’, Women's Center at Marshall University (2010), http://www.marshall.edu/wpmu/wcenter/sexual-assault/rape-culture/

^61.McCallum, ‘The Hangover’, 54.

^62. As opposed to, for example, the way the city of Los Angeles continues to celebrate Kobe Bryant despite his alleged sexual misconduct in Colorado.

^63. Violence against other men and violence against one's self is two-thirds of what Michael Kaufman and later Michael Messner refer to as the ‘triad of violence’; violence against women comprises the remainder of the triad (Messner, Taking the Field).

^64.Solotaroff, ‘Confessions of an NFL Hitman’, 2.

^65. Harrison even once body-slammed a streaker.

^66. See the work of , ‘The Facts(s) of Michael’; ‘Excavating Michael Jordan's Blackness’; and Carrington, ‘Sport, Masculinity, and Black’.

^67.Chiefs Planet, ‘To Reaper and Ultra’, April 30, 2007, http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t = 162357&page = 27/

^68. Quoted in Solotaroff, ‘Confessions of an NFL Hitman’, 3.

^69. Ibid.

^70. Ibid., 2.

^71. Ibid., 2.

^72. Ibid., 4.

^73. Harrison went on in the interview to call Goodell ‘stupid’, a ‘puppet’, and a ‘dictator’, and said that ‘If that man was on fire and I had to piss to put him out, I wouldn't do it. I hate him and will never respect him’. Solotaroff, ‘Confessions of an NFL Hitman’, 4.

^74.Levin, ‘James Harrison’.

^75. This militarization of sport space and discourse was perhaps best typified by two examples discussed by Samantha J. King (King, ‘Offensive Lines’). In the first, then-University of Miami football player Kellen Winslow, Jr., following a hard fought game against the University of Tennessee, exclaimed ‘It's war. They're out to kill you, so I'm out there to kill them…I'm a fucking soldier. Now get away from me or I'll go off’ (quoted in Mumper, ‘The NFL's New Turf’, n.p.), or a year later when National Basketball Association player Kevin Garnett compared the stakes of an important upcoming game to war this way: ‘This is it. It's all for the marbles. I'm sitting in the house loading up the pump, I'm loading up the Uzis, I've got a couple of M-16s, couple of nines, couple of joints with some silencers on them, couple of grenades, got a missile launcher. I'm ready for war’ (quoted in Lupica, ‘Stern Turns Gun-Shy’, 68).

^76.Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 116.

^77. Solotaroff, ‘Confessions of an NFL Hitman’, 3.

^78. Levin, ‘James Harrison’, 1.

^79.Smith, Violence and Sport.

^80. Of course, as Smith notes then and has continued to be the case since, where any given act of sporting violence sits within these categorizations is always contingent, on history, on prevailing social values and norms, on the conventions of governance and subjectivity. Smith, Violence and Sport.

^81.Hesse, ‘Reviewing the Western Spectacle’.

^82.Connell, Gender, 94.

^83.hooks, Black Looks.

^84. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 111.

^85. Ibid., 112.

^86.Young, ‘Violence, Risk and Liability’, 333. The recent debates in the NFL over concussions, especially in the aftermath of several high-profile suicides (e.g. Dave Duerson, Junior Seau) and a major lawsuit, are part and parcel of the discussion of violence, though one that is outside the purview of this article. (For more, see Morrison and Casper, ‘Intersections of Disability Studies’; and Leonard, ‘Masculinity’).

^87.Messner, ‘When Bodies Are Weapons’, 203.

^88.Connell once wrote: ‘Violence is not a “privilege”, but it is very often a means of claiming of defending privilege, asserting superiority or taking advantage’ (Connell, Gender, 95).

^89. The NFL's version of an All-Star selection.

^90. It is well known that Polamalu has not cut his hair in over 10 years.

^91. As the story goes, Head & Shoulders’ parent company, Proctor & Gamble, took out a million dollar insurance policy from Lloyd's of London for his signature mane.

^92.Rovell, ‘Polamalu, Rodgers Jerseys’.

^93.Deitsch, ‘Richard Deitsch > Media Circus’. Of note: Polamalu is the highest ranking ‘non-white’ athlete to appear on this list.

^94.DiRocco, ‘Tim Tebow's Star’. An athlete's ‘Q rating’ measures a person's overall awareness in the general public, not merely sport fans. A positive Q score is the per cent of the general public for which the person is viewed as one of their favourites.

^95.Van Riper, ‘Most Influential Athletes’. A further breakdown of Polamalu's star power from the Forbes piece is as follows: influential – 21%; awareness – 23%; like/like a lot – 64%; dislike/dislike a lot – 3%; N-score (endorsement potential) – 165 (average athlete 14).

^96. Quoted in Pedulla, ‘None Quite Like Polamalu’, c3.

^97. Quoted in Hensley, ‘NFL Any Era’, n.p.

^98. Quoted in Spector, ‘Polamalu is Steelers Football’, n.p.

^99.Beissel and Newman make the case elsewhere that the markers of Polamalu's Samoan heritage – his long hair, soft spoken demeanour, deep spirituality, and embodiment of Fa'aSamoa – at once work to exoticize him to the Pittsburgh populace (Beissel and Newman, ‘Home and Away’).

^100. Quoted in Markazi, ‘Troy Polamalu’, n.p.

^101.Schwartzel, ‘Polamalu Praises “Gasland”’. In the past, Polamalu has made other recommendations of ‘controversial’ documentaries such as anti-corporate farming film Food Inc., the Future of Food about the genetic engineering of food, Tapped which examines the role of the bottled water industry, Waiting for Superman, which calls for public school reform.

^102. Polamalu joined other popular celebrities Mark Ruffalo, Fran Drescher, Debra Winger, and Scarlett Johansson who have commented on gas drilling (Schwartzel, ‘Polamalu Praises “Gasland”’).

^103.Kilmas, ‘Steelers Safety Troy Polamalu’, 1–2.

^104. The video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = tXsoDx9s0j0

^105.Kraszewski, ‘Pittsburgh in Fort Worth’, 146 (emphasis added).

^106. Indeed, part of Roethlisberger's identity makeover involved a highly publicized wedding in which he was portrayed as putting aside his former ways, settling down, and starting a family.