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Northwestern Maryland in the late 1920s contrasted sharply with Maryland's
southern and eastern regions. Economically, the Northwest was a mixture of
commercial diary farms, wheat fields, extensive coal mining, railroads, local small
craft industries, and large industrial concerns like Celenese textiles (13,000
workers) and Kelly-Springfield Tires; additionally there was some subsistence
agriculture in its Appalachian districts. While largely rural, this region was
significantly more urban than the south and east, containing two cities with
populations between 30,000 and 40,000 people, and one with nearly 15,000
residents. This region was also significantly more economically developed than the
South, agriculturally, commercially, and industrially. Ethnically, the northwest was
a blend of Scottish-Irish, Irish, German, "native" white American, and Black
American. The recent immigrant and Black populations were, however, small
(although the Black population was recorded at a significant 10% of the total in the
areas directly north of Baltimore). Culturally, traditionally, and demographically,
northwest Maryland was oriented to the U.S. North, with deep historical ties to the
Susquehanna River valley and mountain regions of southern Pennsylvania. The
political contrast between the northwest and the other two regions of Maryland can
be symbolized by the fact that from the 1870s to the 1940s, the northwest cast,
proportionately-speaking, one of the largest Socialist votes in the country. An area
of some social diversity with a tradition of trade union struggle and some important
working-class victories, its dominant elites were nonetheless politically reactionary,
as their future steadfast resistance to the New Deal would clearly reveal."

To sum up for a moment, Baltimore was not only a border city in a national
context, as a metropolitan center it occupied a middle ground right on the border
between substantially Northern and Southern sections of its own Maryland
hinterlands.

Baltimore's influence over its Maryland hinterlands grew throughout the
1920s due to a multiplicity of factors, not the least of which were infrastructural.