Few exhibitions would be more appropriate for me to walk past on my way to work than the Demarest Metals, a reminder that Belt Magazine is grounded in the history – and the future – of this region, that labor deserves to be honored, that there are complicated, beautiful, and essential stories being written about and by people in areas too often passed over.

By Ed Simon 

Just around the corner from my new office at Carnegie Mellon University, there is an unusual display case exhibiting the remnants of Pittsburgh’s industrial past. Behind glass in a suite within the steampunk environs of Baker Hall, just across from the faculty mail boxes, is an assortment of detritus not oft associated with higher education – a heavy wrench, an empty bottle of Esso lubricant, an old hook, an iron corkscrew, a cog and a sprocket. Most of the objects are heavy, substantial, material – almost all of them are covered in rust. These are the “Demarest Metals,” refuse from the once mighty steel mills that lined the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio, collected by English professor David Demarest who in the 1970s and 1980s, right as big industry began its precipitous decline in Western Pennsylvania, would take classes down to the ruins of the Carrie Blast Furnace and Jones & Laughlin Steel, the Homestead Steel Works and the Hazelwood Coke Works to preserve these relics of an order than fading. “I started to realize that I would have to get out on foot and really look at where I was living – really get to know the city,” Demarest told journalist Margie Carlin in a 1974 interview with the Pittsburgh Press. “After all, literature is about life itself – and our lives are here in the city.” Demarest said that fifty years ago, but it’s every bit as true today.

A native of New Jersey and educated at Princeton University, Demarest’s dissertation from the University of Connecticut was on eighteenth-century writers like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Jane Austen, seemingly continents away from the Mon Valley, yet Demarest understood that scholarship and advocacy, theorization and reporting must be seamless. Though trained in the most canonical of literature, his own writing and research took inspiration from the industrial (and soon to be post-industrial) landscapes which he lived and worked in as Demarest became among the most significant scholars of working-class literature. Authors Joel Woller, Courtney Maloney, and Charles Cunningham in the journal Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice explain that for Demarest “teaching and research were a form of activism, and activism was another dimension of scholarship and pedagogy. His interdisciplinary work bridged classroom and community, text and image, history and memory, and advocacy and inquiry.” I never knew Demarest, he’d been retired for seventeen years by the time I started my MA program at CMU’s English Department, and he passed in 2011, a year before Belt Magazine was founded. Yet I’d hope that he’d see something of his own work in Belt.

Strangely Demarest seems to have haunted Belt in the magazine’s interests from the very foundation of the site, but if anything that merely reflects how influential and wide-ranging his own writing was, so that it’s impossible to cover the industrial lives and afterlives of the Rust Belt without his presence being close. Alongside Fannia Weingartner, Demarest was editor of The River Ran Red – Homestead, 1892 published to mark the centennial of the infamous strike in which seven workers were murdered by Pinkertons hired by Henry Clay Frick, discussed in Connor Coyne’s 2019 “The Moral Power of Rust Belt Labor”, and he was among the founders of the Battle of Homestead Foundation in 1989 which was instrumental to preserving the sites associated with labor; his 1981 play A Gift to America popularized the striking social realist murals of Maxo Vanka at St. Nicholas Croation Church in Milvale which Gavin Moulton wrote about in 2023, and perhaps most significantly, Demarest was the rediscoverer of Thomas Bell’s epic proletariat novel about Carptho-Russyn laborers in Braddock Out of This Furnace, an edition of that work still among the biggest sellers in the catalogue of the University of Pittsburgh Press, and which I had the honor of writing about this past year in my essay “The Pittsburgh School.” His anthology From These Hills, From These Valleys: Selected Fiction about Western Pennsylvania remains a model of regional editorship. The magazine Focus which he published, and that included writing from blue-collar workers at CMU, is the ideal for a publication like our own. In his introduction to Out of This Furnace, Demarest describes Bell’s novel as a “record and memory album of people, a place, and an era,” but that equally describes the archive of the professor’s own work, something that in our own small way we hope that we can continue to honor the legacy of.

Few exhibitions would be more appropriate for me to walk past on my way to work than the Demarest Metals, a reminder that Belt Magazine is grounded in the history – and the future – of this region, that labor deserves to be honored, that there are complicated, beautiful, and essential stories being written about and by people in areas too often passed over. Carnegie Mellon’s support is invaluable for Belt Magazine, but in a more ethereal way, the university is the perfect new home for the site, as the Demarest Metals can testify towards. As a technical and engineering school, CMU was integral to the industrial history of the region, in the same way that the school’s new focus on computers and robotics signals how technology has transformed the economics of Pittsburgh. Within the Dietrich College of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the History Department has long been lauded for its focus on industrial history and the English Department has one of the most venerable and prestigious programs in cultural studies that focuses precisely on the ways in which class and material conditions intersects with literature. Now, continuing in a tradition of innovation, the department has strong concentrations in the digital humanities, using technology to further illuminate culture. As a new departmental home for Belt, the site isn’t just at CMU, but is very much of CMU (and feels as if it always has been).

What all of this means is that the site will continue to discover new writers from our region and collaborate with established ones, that we’ll still publish and promote writers from not just Western Pennsylvania, but also upstate New York, Ohio and Indianna, Kentucky and West Virginia, Illinois and Minnesota; we’ll continue to commission investigative journalism and creative nonfiction, photo essays and poetry. We will remain what we’ve always been – of the Rust Belt, by the Rust Belt, and for the Rust Belt. With Carnegie Mellon’s editorial support, we won’t just have the ability to remain financial solvent at the administrative level, but we can also avail ourselves of the intellectual, technical, and organizational talent at one of the world’s great universities. Crucially, Belt Media Collaborative remains technically an independent organization, even as my own editorial duties are subsumed within my responsibilities as Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department. That means that the site itself is still independent, and most importantly, that all the support which you give to Belt can now be maximized in the support of our writers, hopefully allowing us to publish more. Demarest and Eugene Levy in a 1989 essay for Pittsburgh History about exploring the remnants of an old zinc factory wrote that “Even as we began to ‘read’ the meaning of the furnace ruins, the statement made by the architecture stayed vividly in mind: Here was a technology intimately dependent on the activity of human workers.” It’s something we should never forget at Belt, either.

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University.