Whats it like to be Pennsylvanian and to suddenly be the darling of the heritage movement?
I lived in Pennsylvania until I was 21. Most of my life, I’ve lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I went to school at Virginia Tech. I don’t see this whole issue as a geographical thing so much as a philosophical thing. I see it as Jeffersonianism versus Hamiltonianism and big government, as the issue here. You can be a Jeffersonian and be from Minnesota. During the presidential campaign in 2000, one of Al Gore’s Pennsylvania directors said, in an attempt to denigrate Pennsylvania, “Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Mississippi in between.” They call it Pennsyltucky. One of the things I point out in my book is that in the whole southern rim of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey were called the “middle states.” The Yankee belt ran from New England, through northern Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, and the upper Midwest. Those were the descendents of the Puritans, who couldn’t tolerate other lifestyles and wanted to use the powers
