footnote 6 It was only in 2022 that Hibbing, which elected two new Republican legislators, left behind its transitional status as an ambivalent ‘Obama-Trump’ district and was absorbed into the vast and darkening red plain that now runs unbroken from Lake Superior to the Cascades. Yet until last year the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ( dfl) still held ten of the Range’s eleven state House seats. In national politics, the deluge came in 2016, when Hibbing narrowly voted for Trump over Clinton Biden failed to win it back in 2020. The city of Hibbing delivered two-to-one majorities for generations of Democrats as distinct as Lyndon Johnson, Paul Wellstone and Amy Klobuchar. For decades the heavily unionized Iron Range was among the most dependable Democratic regions in the country, offering loyal if lonely support to landslide victims like George McGovern and Walter Mondale. Galaxies apart in history, economy and social geography, Hibbing and North Oaks have recently crossed paths in politics. footnote 5 Some five thousand of them now live in North Oaks: the town’s median household income is over $220,000 a year its average home price, over $696,000 and nearly three-quarters of its adult residents have earned a bachelor’s degree. Since the 1970s this preeminence has helped the Twin Cities attract and retain a disproportionate share of high-earning managerial professionals and their families. Nevertheless, the suburb has prospered handsomely within the booming ‘Headquarters Economy’ of the region, home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other metro area of its size. Paul than a secluded realm apart from it. (In 2008 North Oaks successfully petitioned to remove images of its streets from Google Maps it remains invisible on Street View.) Billed as ‘an exclusive, private community’, naturally complete with its own golf club, lakeside beaches and conservation area, North Oaks strives to appear less an outgrowth of Minneapolis–St. Though its literal gates came down in the 1980s, the town continues to enforce its no-trespassing rules. To this day, the city of North Oaks maintains no public property: all land, including the streets and sidewalks, belongs either to individual residents or a private homeowner’s association. footnote 4 In the 1950s Hill’s heirs converted the family estate into a kind of libertarian residential experiment. Hill, the ‘Empire Builder’, and the man Jay Gatsby’s father hoped his son would become. The area was first developed as a manor home and recreational cattle farm by the railroad tycoon James J. Paul’s ex-urb of North Oaks, mn, passed its quiet twentieth century at the opposite end of American capitalism’s value pipeline-not where the money comes from, but where it takes refuge. footnote 3 Its median household income is under $50,000 a year, well below the state norm its average home price is just $111,300 and less than a quarter of its adult population holds a bachelor’s degree. As health care, retail and other service sectors outstrip the industries of the ‘historical working class’, Hibbing’s economy has come to resemble that of many other struggling blue-collar towns across the Midwest. The mines are as productive as ever, but now employ fewer than 6 per cent of the city’s workforce. Yet Hibbing today is a world removed from its iron age zenith. The outrageous wealth of the Iron Range was never expropriated from the expropriators, but over the course of a century, after further concessions won by mineworker unions, a fair portion was extracted from the extractors. It was here in the 1,800-seat auditorium-underneath ornate moulded ceilings and Belgian crystal chandeliers-that school officials famously cut the young Robert Zimmerman’s microphone midway through a 1959 performance of ‘Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay’. footnote 2 At the time of its construction in 1922, Hibbing High School, a Tudor Revival masterpiece known as ‘the Castle in the Woods’, was perhaps the most expensive public school in the United States. footnote 1 Thanks to some combination of pure mineral largesse and fear of labour militancy-strikes in 19 almost brought the iron industry to its knees-a progressive city government successfully taxed mining profits to fund a spectacular array of public works. Indispensable to Allied victory in the Second World War, the exploitation of Minnesota’s Iron Range also gave rise to a series of local political-economic arrangements at once distinctive and paradigmatic. To the north, the city of Hibbing sits non-coincidentally at the edge of what was, for much of the twentieth century, the largest iron mine on the planet. T o situate the 2022 midterm election in the context of the last hundred years of American politics, consider two communities in Minnesota.
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