I grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania—a steel town in the 1940s and early '50s when I lived there. Beginning in 1941, it was also a union town. The city had been a Republican stronghold, but after the steelworkers voted 4–1 for SWOC, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, it became firmly Democratic. I remember Harry Truman speaking from the back of a railway car in 1948; he carried the city by a large margin. Today Johnstown is a Rust-Belt city, the mills are closed, the population is about two-thirds of what it was in the 1940s.
These days I live in Princeton, New Jersey, a university town, which is also home to many well-to-do doctors and lawyers and to a significant group of brokers and bankers who commute every day to New York. Princeton is not in the top ten of America's richest cities, but it's up there. The city's inhabitants include black and Hispanic minorities, but it is mostly a white and very prosperous community.
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