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Faces From An American Dream
Photographs by Martin J. Desht

In 1989, photographer Martin J. Desht and historian Richard E. Sharpless of Lafayette College began documenting the effects of American deindustrialization: the large scale shift from the industrial economy to the new service and information economy. Their work particularly concerned the state of Pennsylvania, once considered the most industrialized state in the nation.

At the height of American industrialism, a period roughly from 1900 to 1950, Philadelphia was billing itself as the 'workshop of the world' and Pittsburgh was famous as the greatest steelmaking center the world had ever seen. It was a metropolitan combination that made Pennsylvania not only the most heavily and diversely industrialized state and home to industrialists Asa Packer, Stephen Girard, Andrew Carnegie, and Charles Schwab, but also an important base for organized labor and community action. From the time of Ben Franklin, it was also an early model of collective citizenship. Over the century, like its famous Pennsylvania Railroad, the state was seen as a model of American enterprise that experienced its share of fortune and failure: from industrial violence and police actions culminating with the Molly McGuire trials, to the all encompassing industrial/social responsibility ideals promoted by Milton S. Hershey.

By 1980, deindustrialization had begun to seriously influence every facet of Pennsylvanian-and American-life, just as the industrial revolution had a century earlier. From the quality of public schools, city life, family life, from Woolworth to Wal-Mart, to the role of prisons, our view of religion and racism, to the new, almost strictly vertical distribution of wealth, to a new kind of corporate gamemanship that coerced local governments to compete for new jobs or save existing ones, the demise of America's manufacturing economy left no individual or institution untouched. Perhaps more than anything else, it virtually re-defined the American Dream for skilled and unskilled working Americans at the end of the twentieth century.

                                 
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