Jimmy Carter’s sainthood papers must be on their way to Rome. Considering his White House successors, Baptist Carter’s canonization by the Vatican wouldn’t be at all unreasonable, at least according to the many obituaries published on our 39th president.
But lost in the big-picture analyses of Carter’s presidency is this stark fact: Jimmy Carter (and his corporate-lawyer appointees) did nothing to slow, let alone halt, the economic decline of what once was Ohio’s industrial heartland, its Youngstown-Warren region. (The statewide poverty rate is about 13.3%. In Mahoning County, it’s 19.5%; in Trumbull, 17.2%.)
People may know parts of the Big Picture story: On Sept. 19, 1977, the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., then one of the nation’s largest steel producers, said it’d shut down its Campbell Works, which adjoined Youngstown…