The historical evolution of Appalachia’s economy has been the subject of debate for several decades, but explanations of the industrial transition fit into several general categories. The traditional view is that from colonial times to the Civil War, farmers were small subsistence producers who lived in an agrarian society characterized by isolation and the absence of linkage to external markets. Others reject the idea that capitalism and market economics did not affect rural Americans until the Civil War and contend that a “market revolution” occurred during the Jacksonian era that sparked the transition of an economy based on local self-sufficiency to one dependent on external markets. A third group of scholars reject the “agrarian myth” outright and argue that farmers were never truly self-sufficient, culturally or geographically isolated, or completely uninfluenced by larger market relations. Instead, they contend that even during early colonial times farmers had preferred cash and profits to mere subsistence and were consumers as well as producers.11
A more recent perspective emanates from the writings of noted scholar Immanuel Wallerstein. This view conceptualizes capitalism as an expansionist “world system” evolving over centuries and operating over and above the collective decisions of individuals. Capitalism is continuously expansive in its search for markets, until the world is organized into various stages of incorporation: the core, or major metropolitan centers of investment capital and commerce; the semiperiphery, highly developed commercial staging areas for capital and trade; and the periphery, or fringe regions where raw materials are extracted to support the more developed spheres within the system. Economic relations that hold together the world system are replicated in the semiperiphery and periphery spheres. Thus, in preindustrial Appalachia the developed sections provided staging areas for the importation and shipment of money and goods from the fringe to the semiperipheral urban areas of America.12
Modern scholars of Appalachia typically reject the ideas that a great polarity existed between preindustrial and industrial Appalachia or that a sudden and cataclysmic change transformed a region previously untouched by capital. Even the most remote sections of the region were involved in the market; true isolation was rare and transitory.13 As Kenneth Noe observes, “Modernization did not strike a primitive culture in the 1880s”; it was already under way in the 1850s.14 Wilma Dunaway goes further and argues that the region was capitalist from the moment of European intrusion.15
One of the reasons for the uneven development of preindustrial Appalachia is not the lack of capital investment but rather its limitation in the older, settled sections of the region. Just as Appalachia was at the periphery of American capitalism, the undeveloped interior of Appalachia was connected to the more urbanized areas around its edges, where links with the market system were first established. Settled at an early date on the Ohio River, Wheeling, Virginia, became a redistribution point, with commercial connections in the emerging national market centers such as Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, and with smaller markets back in the mountains.16
As in many parts of the country, the Civil War had a traumatic effect on the postwar economy of Appalachia. Scholars are still analyzing its role in shaping the postwar industrial expansion, which reached a climax between 1880 and 1920. Both Union and Confederate armies burned and pillaged their way through the countryside, reducing the population to destitution and destroying the transportation and industrial infrastructure. Opposing local guerrillas and bushwhackers continued the depredation against their neighbors, scarring communities for generations. It is difficult to assess the extent to which the war was responsible for the region’s postwar economic problems. Although some scholars believe that the economic decline actually began before the war, as population growth outstripped the region’s ability to feed itself, others argue that the war itself destroyed the economy. Nor is there a consensus on the degree to which the Civil War shaped industrialization.17 However, it is clear that many future entrepreneurs and speculators were first introduced to Appalachia’s wealth of natural resources during the war. Former Confederates, such as General John D. Imboden, Major Jedidiah Hotchkiss, and General William Mahone, and former Union captain Richard M. Broas, tirelessly speculated in and promoted the development of Central Appalachian coal land.18
It is noteworthy that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when sections of the region were undergoing a wrenching industrial transition, local color fiction was creating the myth of Appalachia as a place “where time stood still.” No section of the mountains exposed this polarity between reality and fiction more dramatically than central Appalachia. Industrial society advanced into the mountains behind armies of resident and imported laborers who laid the tracks for three major railroad systems. The first to cut its way through was the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railroad. Fulfilling a dream dating back to the eighteenth century, when planners of the C&O Canal hoped to connect Virginia tidewater ports with the Ohio River, the C&O Railroad invaded the formerly inaccessible New River Gorge country, laying the iron rails linking Richmond and Huntington in 1873.19
The Pocahontas and Flat Top coalfields of southern West Virginia, southwest of the C&O line, were connected to the national markets by the Norfolk and Western (N&W) Railroad. The N&W offered financial assistance to investors for the construction of mines and towns along its right-of-way, and in 1883, when the railroad reached Pocahontas, Virginia, the town was already in full operation with large stockpiles of coal ready for immediate shipment. Eventually, the N&W built a major branch line to Big Stone Gap in Wise County, Virginia, and forged ahead with the main line along the Guyandot River Valley to the Ohio River and on to the Great Lakes.20
While the C&O and the N&W were developing central Appalachia from the east, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad began constructing lines into the Kentucky coalfields from the west. Eventually, the entire region was integrated into an elaborate network of main lines, branch lines, feeder lines, and spurs for transporting natural resources extracted from central Appalachia.21
In the southern Appalachians the boom came with the arrival of the Western North Carolina Railroad at Asheville in 1880 and the Tennessee state line in 1882. Asheville became a boomtown, and the pioneer developers soon gave way to the large companies, which often had operations in several states. Because of its strategic location in the Southern mountain region, Knoxville had been an evolving commercial and transportation hub for nearly a century when the convergence of railroads and Cumberland coal and iron elevated the city to the status of regional development center. From this growth center commercial and modernizing influences reached out into the surrounding mountains. Knoxville’s primary industry became light manufacturing, which drew on the surrounding mountain population for its labor force rather than the black “industrial reserve” of the Black Belt.22
The East Tennessee tri-cities of Elizabethton, Bristol, and Johnson City held a similar strategic position on the emerging railroad system in the mountains, and they too went through a period of growth. The tri-cities’ industrial expansion attracted immigrants and blacks, but most of them worked in construction and the extractive industries. The subsequent development of the tri-cities as a textile manufacturing center provided work primarily for white people in the surrounding countryside, following the Southern pattern of a dual economy in which blacks toiled in the cotton fields and poor whites worked in the mills.23
The enormous capital investment that was poured into central Appalachian railroads, timber, and coalmining completed the social and economic transition of the region. Trains carried away the coal and timber, but they also returned with manufactured goods such as food, dry goods, household furnishings, farm supplies, and other products people ordered out of mail-order catalogs. The railroad connected local communities to the national markets and, as elsewhere in rural America, exerted a profound influence on the way people lived. They were the lines of communication that made available newspapers, the telegraph, and the telephone, which also integrate
d Appalachians into the national culture and identity. With the circulation of cash and the burgeoning population of wage earners who came to work in the mill and mine towns, merchants were increasingly attracted by the potential for trade beyond the towns in the surrounding countryside.24
Coal was the most valuable natural resource in Appalachia. The unincorporated company town became one of the defining features of life in the region because more than three-quarters, and in certain districts closer to 90 percent, of the miners lived in them. The company constructed the town’s physical plant, became the miners’ landlord, offered police and fire protection, built the churches and stores, and provided the utilities and other services towns needed. Of course, there were great differences between company towns, ranging from crude coal camps thrown up on “gob piles” to model towns with all the modern conveniences and a benevolent owner-operator. However, all of them were privately owned entities, not sovereign political jurisdictions, and the operators who owned them exerted extraordinary influence. Organized into operator associations, they collectively manipulated local and state public policy to their advantage, often to the detriment of the public at large.25
A scarcity of labor in the region also necessitated the importation of a workforce. Consequently, the population of the central Appalachian plateau grew dramatically, from less than 200,000 in 1870 to more than 1.2 million in 1920. However, growth did not proceed uniformly, nor was it evenly distributed. The West Virginia plateau grew rapidly throughout the era, with the population of its southern counties nearly quintupling from 93,174 to 446,051. Kentucky’s plateau counties, which already contained a sizable population on the eve of industrialization, grew sporadically from 216,883 to 538,350 during the same period. On the other hand, Virginia’s central Appalachian counties grew steadily from 55,349 to 155,405, and the plateau counties of northern Tennessee doubled their population from 45,375 to 96,063.26
The reaction of native Appalachians to industrialization was mixed. Some Appalachian farmers were reluctant to become dependent on wage labor, adhering to the belief common among nineteenth-century farmers that wage labor was less secure and of lower status. On the other hand, many showed little reluctance in moving to the proliferating mine towns. As a result of industrialization, farm sizes decreased, the population burgeoned, taxes increased, and farm commodities brought in by rail from the Midwest underpriced farmers in their own local markets. While these pressures were pushing farmers off the land, wages offered by the developing coal industry were attracting them to the new mine towns.27
Contrary to the popular notion that Appalachia was populated by a homogeneous old American (i.e., British) stock, industrializing Appalachia presented a matrix of cultural interaction between a multitude of races and cultures. The preindustrial African American population of central Appalachia was small, totaling only 14,360 in 1870, but by 1890 that figure had more than doubled to 30,226 and rocketed to 108,872 by 1930 when the in-migration ended. Most of this increase was associated with the rise of the coal industry.28
Although the migration of African Americans into central Appalachia has not been well documented, it is clear that many of them regarded coalmining as a “cash crop,” a means to acquire cash that enabled them to keep farms back in Virginia or North Carolina. African American tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Deep South, particularly Alabama, also took temporary employment in mining and other industrial occupations to sustain their families during difficult years.29
West Virginia was the only state to track this migration. In 1921 the West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics reported that 75 percent of the black male wage earners in the state were employed as coalminers, and more than 60 percent of the African American population had been born outside the state, primarily in Virginia. An African American minister described this migratory process in the early 1930s: “It used to be the common thing for men of my people to own farms in Virginia or North Carolina. They would go home and get the crop started and perhaps, having a son who would carry it on, the father would go back to the mining fields and work. . . . Finally the son would not be content to stay on the farm but would insist on going to the mining fields with the father. So, the whole family would come at last.”30
In the coalfields native Appalachians and African Americans encountered a bewildering array of newly arrived European immigrants. As the immigrants poured into industrializing America in the late nineteenth century, the number of immigrant miners in the region grew correspondingly between 1880 and 1920. Although there are no precise estimates for central Appalachia, the number of immigrants must have reached at least one-quarter of the mine workforce, and in some locations much higher. In West Virginia, for example, the number of foreign miners among the mine labor force was less than 1,000 in 1870. By 1907 their number had reached nearly 16,000, and on the eve of World War I (1915), after the flow of new immigrants had stopped and at least half of the immigrants had returned to their native lands, immigrant coalminers in West Virginia still totaled almost 32,000.31
In the coalfields, native whites, African Americans, and foreign immigrants lived and worked in company towns, where they usually were segregated into sections designated as “Colored Town,” “Hunky Hollow,” or “Little Italy.” Generally, there was discrimination in the kinds of jobs available to each group, but once underground the men worked together. Even on the surface, however, the rigid lines of segregation often became blurred in company towns, and the miners came to focus on their common economic interests in the United Mine Workers of America, the one organization in which they exerted some measure of control. The extent of cultural exchange, and eventually intermarriage, among this extremely heterogeneous population is generally overlooked even by regional scholars.32
As coalmining boomed, so did the grievances of the miners in this most hazardous of all American occupations. In addition to the knowledge that wages in Appalachian mines were fixed 15 to 30 percent lower than they were above the Ohio River, miners were rankled by the poor working conditions. Some cut into the miners’ pay, and others were life-threatening. Just how hazardous is revealed by the tens of thousands of miners who have lost their lives in Appalachian coalmines: more than 21,000 in West Virginia alone since 1883. Most died singly in roof falls, but it was explosions that attracted the press and captured the nation’s imagination.
Unalterably hostile to unions, southern Appalachian operators evicted and blacklisted miners who joined the United Mine Workers of America and launched a concerted campaign to destroy the organization through the use of court injunctions and company guards. Periodically, the effort to establish a union exploded into what have become known as the “mine wars” because of the scale of violence involved. Perhaps the most legendary of these mine wars occurred in the Paint and Cabin Creek (West Virginia) war of 1912–13, the Mingo (West Virginia) war between 1919 and 1921, and the March on Logan County and Battle for Blair Mountain, which also occurred between 1919 and 1921. The Harlan County (Kentucky) mine war waged off and on between 1931 and 1937. In all of these protracted conflicts, the coal companies prevailed because the local, state, and federal governments intervened on the company’s side to break organized labor.33
Ironically, relief for union organizers did not appear until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated many reforms in an effort to jolt the nation’s economy out of the Depression. Among them was the Wagner Act of 1935, which granted workers the legal right to organize into labor unions. Almost overnight the Appalachian coalfields became organized, although union organizers encountered fierce resistance in some sections. The coal industry burgeoned during World War II, and just as demand began to slacken in the postwar era, another New Deal project rekindled the demand for Appalachian coal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which constructed hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River in the 1930s to generate electrical power for rural economic development, began constructing coal-powered generating plants in the la
te 1940s, a policy shift that required the agency to purchase mass quantities of inexpensive coal. On one hand the new policy encouraged coal production, but on the other it emphasized lower mining costs. Small truck mines by the thousands sprang up throughout the Appalachian coalfields, strip-mined coal emerged as a major source of supply, and established companies were pressured to mechanize their mines in order to compete.34
The expansion of the coal industry in southern Appalachia peaked in the early 1950s with the employment of approximately 246,000 employees; if the Appalachian counties of Ohio and Pennsylvania are included, the number grows to nearly 500,000. The boom in mine employment that marked the first half of the twentieth century abruptly reversed itself in the last half of the century. In the 1950s, the widespread adoption of the continuous miner, a machine that consolidated all the basic steps of mining into a single machine process, precipitated a 31 percent decline in the number of Appalachian miners between 1950 and 1960, from 197,162 to 136,230.35 But the worst was yet to come. In the 1970s, the industry embraced automation by adopting the computer-operated long-wall mining system, and the downward spiral of coalmine employment in southern Appalachia continued unabated through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1998, only 46,175 Appalachian coalminers still plied their trade, less than one-quarter of those employed when mechanization began in the 1950s. Moreover, the U.S. Bureau of the Census predicted in 2000 that coalmine employment would decline another 32 percent by 2008. At the same time, coal production is higher than ever.36
Although the coal industry has provided high-paying jobs for thousands, the restructuring of the coal industry toward high-technology and low-cost production methods has left some bitter legacies. The great Appalachian out-migration ranks high among them. Between 1940 and 1960, more than 1 million Appalachians left the region. Disproportionately, they were the uprooted families of coalminers heading for urban factory jobs in the Midwestern cities.37
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