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Saturday, May 12, 2001
By Michael McGough
I was in Denver recently for my nephew Patrick's Confirmation, and found the Mile High City miles-thick with traffic. As my sister and I stalled on the highway, I caught sight of a bumper sticker I was to observe several times during my visit: Under an outline of the Rocky Mountains, the word NATIVE was displayed in ominous block letters. Take that, newcomers!
You won't see that sort of xenophobic decal on Pittsburgh bumpers, but that's probably evidence of a paucity of immigrants rather than any welcoming attitude on the part of Pittsburghers. A quite different message is evident in some local signs of the times - political signs, that is.
When I first saw mayoral candidate Bob O'Connor's slogan "Because This is Home," I thought first of those placards real estate agents used to pound into the yards of vacant homes: "If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now." But a little deconstruction turned up what I think is the slogan's real meaning: Bob O'Connor is a Pittsburgher for Pittsburghers. Or, as a less opaque O'Connor catch-phrase has it, "People and Neighborhoods First." Or, in my loose translation, "We don't need your stinking Nordstrom."
I admit that "Because This Is Home" is open to non-nativist readings. After all, people who move here from other places consider Pittsburgh their home (though we born-and-bred Pittsburghers know better). It makes more sense, though, to gloss "Because This Is Home" as a subtler version of a pitch made explicitly by some candidates in next Tuesday's primary: I'm a real Pittsburgher."
And, for most candidates, real means native-born or, to employ a phrase I first made use of writing obituaries for the Post-Gazette, a "lifelong resident of Pittsburgh."
After a candidate for City Council mouthed that mantra during an endorsement interview, Don Hammonds, my colleague on the editorial page and a St. Louis native, said: "If one more candidate says he's a lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, I won't be responsible for my actions." Actually, Don is a peaceful guy - but his exasperation was real and understandable.
It's a 'Burgh thing, this loyalty to home-town politicians. In his poem "The Death of the Hired Man," Robert Frost wrote that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Or vote for you.
I confess to a certain ambivalence about Pittsburgh nativism. I am proud to have recruited several out-of-town (and even out-of-the-country) journalists to my birthplace, after assuring them that this was a cosmopolitan place. I cringe when I turn on the television set and hear KDKA boasting about its "Hometown Advantage," or when a letter to the editor asks how Pittsburgh can be "Someplace Special" when it doesn't offer this or that amenity.
Yet I have it on good authority that, in my own way, I'm as much a 'Burgh booster as anyone on Channel 2.
A friend of mine, a graduate of Amherst College, recently said of his fellow Amherst alums that they always point out fellow graduates, just as Pittsburghers and Canadians are quick to identify their own.
Ouch. His crack reminded me that over the years I have tipped him off to the Pittsburgh origins of celebrities as diverse as Michael Keaton, Robert Bork and Charles Grodin. Was I giving vent to the very quality I find so cloying in KDKA promos - Pittsburgh Pride?
Pride is probably the wrong word; let's call it loyalty, with a little defensiveness thrown in. In truth, I revel in Pittsburgh not because of its cutting edge in robotics or its reasonable housing prices or its low crime rate or its contributions to Hollywood but because, well, "because this is home." Partly this may be a form of narcissism: You could say I love my home town because it produced me. But there's more to it than that.
For the past week I have been hunting for a new apartment, and the hunting grounds are also my old stomping grounds: Shadyside. I pointed out to the woman who showed me one property that a cousin had grown up across the street, both of my grandmothers had lived within a few blocks and I had gone to grade school at nearby Sacred Heart School. If I hadn't checked myself, I would have told her that I was literally a native of Shadyside, having been born, as were all five of my siblings, in Shadyside Hospital in the pre-UPMC era.
It's hard to quantify the value, psychic or political, of such continuity - but I think it has some value. When I drive two of my Pittsburgh-based nephews through the East End, I can show them schools and parks where not only their mother frolicked but their grandmother as well. No doubt these family travelogues bore them, but I like to think they also reinforce their own sense of rootedness.
But not, I hope, to the extent that when they reach voting age they'll pull the lever only for native Pittsburghers.
Ay, there's the rub. Is it possible for a community simultaneously to cherish rootedness - and the pride of place it often encourages - while welcoming healthy grafts from elsewhere? Writ large, this is the brain-teasing question that underlies serious discussions about how much immigration the United States should encourage - and whether it is wrong, or even racist, to hope that immigrants come from some places and not others.
Of course, Pittsburgh is not a nation, nor is it ethnically homogeneous. 'Burghers of all colors and cultures can play the "native Pittsburgher" card - and they do in every election. Unlike the United States, moreover, Pittsburgh can't realize population growth without in-migration. Richard Baumhammers' delusions notwithstanding, Pittsburgh is not inundated with "foreigners" however defined.
That's too bad - and I say that as a native Pittsburgher. Without infusions from elsewhere, Pittsburgh runs the risk of becoming (in the immortal words of Dr. Cyril Wecht) a "jerkwater town." We would be a better place if some of those newcomers to Denver - or Seattle or Portland - had moved here instead.
Still, the "here"ness of a place depends on a core of inhabitants for whom living there is not a choice but an echo of their or their forbears' lives. On second thought, if that's what Bob O'Connor means by "Because This Is Home," the native Pittsburgher in me will cut him a break. But please, Bob, don't say you want to be the mayor of "Someplace Special."
Michael McGough is editorial page editor of the Post-Gazette. His e-mail address is mmcgough@post-gazette.com. 