by Hardy Green
48 “Portal 31: Kentucky’s First Exhibition Coal Mine,” www.portal31.org; also www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/lynch.htm.
49 Crawford, “The New Company Town,” pp. 55-56.
Chapter 3: Exploitationville
1 Herbert G. Gutman, “Two Lockouts in Pennsylvania, 1873-1874,” in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp. 326-343.
2 Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), pp. 182-186; Helene Smith, Export: A Patch of Tapestry Out of Coal Country America (Greensburg, PA: McDonald/Sward Publishing Co., 1986), pp. 104-105; Crandall A. Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 146. Nor were towns necessarily better outside of the South. In his autobiography, former miner John Brophy describes the town of Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania, as “a grimy huddle in the narrow valley of Black Lick Creek overshadowed by slag piles and the hills of the Alleghenies.” John Brophy, A Miner’s Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 111.
3 Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, pp. 208-216; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 117-118; Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 3; John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 18.
4 Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 156-166.
5 American Social History Project, Who Built America: Working People & the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture & Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 211.
6 Shifflett, Coal Towns, p. 50.
7 Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003), pp. 132-134; Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 48-62, 117-119, 131-284, and passim; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, vol. 2 (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 219.
8 Wikipedia entry for Battle of Blair Mountain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain.
9 Jim Garland, “Biography” included in album liner notes of Sarah Ogan Gunning, The Silver Dagger, Rounder Records 0051, 1976.
10 Freese, Coal, pp. 106-110, 119-122; Wikipedia entry on Schuylkill Canal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuylkill_canal#Competition_with_the_railroad.
11 Freese, Coal, pp. 105, 137; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. xi, 27; Howard Zinn, “The Colorado Coal Strike, 1914-1914,” in Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 8-9.
12 Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, pp. 56-69.
13 Ibid., pp. 65, 71; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 29-30.
14 Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 29-33.
15 Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, pp. 130-133; Shifflett, Coal Towns, p. 35.
16 Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, pp. 134-136, 143-145.
17 Ibid., p. 190; Memories of Widen and Dille, West Virginia, at www.appalachiacoal.com/Widen,%20West%20Virginia,%20Appalachian%20coal%20camp.html (as of February 8, 2010).
18 Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 59-64.
19 Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 179-232; Priscilla Long, “The 1913 Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike, With Reflections on the Cause of Coal-Strike Violence,” in The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? ed. John H. M. Laslett (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 347-349.
20 Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1963), p. 93; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers , pp. 145-148.
21 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 107-109, 112-115; quote is on p. 115.
22 Ibid., pp. 145-146.
23 Ibid., pp. 325, 343-344.
24 Caudill interview with Mother Earth News at www.motherearthnews.com/Nature-Community/1975-07-01/The-Plowboy-Interview-Harry-Caudill.aspx.
25 Green, Only a Miner, pp. 281-312; Merle Travis, Folk Songs of the Hills, Capitol 48001.
26 Although Eller (Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, p. 188) argues that some company stores exploited workers by charging “all the market would bear,” Shifflett (Coal Towns, pp. 183-184) argues that debt peonage was in fact rare in the towns he investigated, including Stonega, Virginia. As to the entrapment aspect of scrip, Shifflett asserts that after 1900, Virginia and West Virginia miners received 50 percent to 70 percent of their earnings in cash. Moreover, says Shifflett, the existence of the railroads meant miners were not isolated and that company stores faced increasing competition from out-of-town retailers. See also Price V. Fishback, “Did Coal Miners ‘Owe Their Souls to the Company Store’? Theory and Evidence from the Early 1900s,” Journal of Economic History 46 (December 1986): 1011-1029; Price V. Fishback, Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners 1890-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and James Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 128-137.
27 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 114, 190; Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, p. 45; Brophy, A Miner’s Life, pp. 35, 47, 51, and passim.
28 Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 176-180; the photo of the Lynch store may be found at www.portal31.org/images/bigstore.jpg; Andrews, Killing for Coal, pp. 217-221.
29 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 98-108; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 68-80; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, p. 197.
30 Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, p. 176.
31 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, p. 110; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 85-92; Brophy, A Miner’s Life, pp. 43-45; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 333.
32 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 118-121; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 103-106; EH.Net entry on workers’ compensation at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/fishback.workers.compensation.
33 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 142-143; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 108-109.
34 John H. M. Laslett, “A Model of Industrial Solidarity? Interpreting the UMWA’s First Hundred Years, 1890-1990,” in The United Mine Workers of America, pp. 1-2; Green, Only a Miner, p. 166.
35 Freese, Coal, pp. 137-141; Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, p. 133; Shifflett, Coal Towns, p. 30.
36 Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 343-351; Andrews, Killing for Coal, pp. 233-286; Zinn, “The Colorado Coal Strike,” pp. 20-52; Long, “The 1913 Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike,” pp. 347-359.
37 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 579-589; Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, pp. 125-126; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 348-351.
38 Chernow, Titan, p. 590; Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, pp. 127-137; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, p. 355; Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), p. 168-171; Hevener, Which Side Are You On? pp. 144-145.
39 David Brody, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 48-81.
40 Bernstein, The Lean Years, pp. 162-163; Andrews, Killing for Coal, pp. 287- 288; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, pp. 395-399, 407-409; Laslett, The United Mine Workers of America, p. 19.
41 Bernstein, The Lean Years, pp. 360-366, 377-384; Shifflett, Coal Towns, pp. 117-118; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mount
aineers, pp. 155-158.
42 Bernstein, The Lean Years, pp. 385-390.
43 Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), pp. 30-45, 61; Alan J. Singer, “‘Something of a Man’: John L. Lewis, the UMWA, and the CIO, 1919-1943,” in The United Mine Workers of America, pp. 117-119.
44 Hevener, Which Side Are You On? pp. 4, 16-17, 22, 102-103, 129-146; testimony of Harlan County Sheriff J. H. Blair in Harlan Miners Speak, ed. Theodore Dreiser et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), pp. 234-237.
45 Hevener, Which Side Are You On? pp. 181-182.
46 Robert Glass Cleland, A History of Phelps Dodge, 1834-1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 21-137, 161-188, 248-253; John Collins Rudolf, “Talk of the Town: Is Copper Up Today?” New York Times, November 28, 2008; James Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 11-12, 42-46, 103; Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1995), pp. 3-6, 15-39.
47 Leland M. Roth, “Company Towns in the Western United States,” in The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age, ed. John S. Garner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 180-184; Phelps Dodge company history at www.answers.com/topic/phelps-dodge-corp; Allen, The Company Town in the American West, pp. x, 128-137; Rosenblum, Copper Crucible, pp. 40-44.
48 Rosenblum, Copper Crucible, pp. 52-139; Jonathan Rosenblum, “The Dismal Precedent that Gave Us Caterpillar,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1992; Robert S. Greenberger, “Striking Back: More Firms Get Tough and Keep Operating In Spite of Walkouts,” Wall Street Journal, October 11, 1983.
49 Rosenblum, Copper Crucible, pp. 171-196; Allanna Sullivan, “Union Decertification Possible This Week at Phelps Dodge Operations in Arizona,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1985.
50 Allanna Sullivan and John Valentine, “U.S. Copper Industry Is Ill and Getting Sicker,” Wall Street Journal, June 18, 1985; Phelps Dodge company history at www.answers.com/topic/phelps-dodge-corp; Don Lee, “A Copper Town Digs Out: China’s Hunger for the Metal Pushes Up Its Price and Invigorates a U.S. Mining Community,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2004; Andrew Ross Sorkin and Ian Austin, “Smaller Rival in Agreement to Acquire Copper Giant,” New York Times, November 20, 2006; Henny Sender, “Heat of a Copper Deal: Why Lower Prices May Have Sealed the Fate of Phelps Dodge,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2007; Freeport-McMoRan 2008 Annual Report, p. 30; “Major Layoffs at Morenci Mine,” Associated Press, January 10, 2009.
Chapter 4: A Southern Principality
1 Lois McDonald, Southern Mill Hills (New York: Hillman, 1928), p. 44, quoted in Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1960), p. 7.
2 “Kannapolis: Still Feeling Change at Cannon,” Raleigh News & Observer, September 1, 1985; Mildred Gwin Andrews, The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), p. 98; Cynthia D. Anderson, The Social Consequences of Economic Restructuring in the Textile Industry: Change in a Southern Mill Village (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 57-69; “Powerful C.A. Cannon Rules Kannapolis, N.C., But He Faces Challenge,” Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1969; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 188-194.
3 Helen Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis: Tales From Towel City (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2006), p. 36; Kannapolis: A Pictorial History (Kannapolis: City of Kannapolis, 2008), pp. 18-19; “Cannon II,” Fortune, November 1933, pp. 55, 140-141; Anderson, The Social Consequences, p. 57.
4 Fieldcrest-Cannon Inc. company history at www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Fieldcrest-Cannon-Inc-Company-History.html; Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis, pp. 13-26; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, pp. 25-28, 249; “Cannon II,” p. 141.
5 Fieldcrest-Cannon Inc. company history; Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis , pp. 36-38; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, p. 81; “Cannon II,” p. 141.
6 Kannapolis: A Pictorial History, pp. 24-81.
7 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), pp. 107-134; David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 13-32; Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1921), pp. 106-112, 122-125; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, pp. 2-3.
8 Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 131-132.
9 Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, p. 40.
10 Ibid., p. 132.
11 Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 114, 379, note 1. At the height of the coal boom of the 1920s, only 79 percent of West Virginia coal miners and only 64 percent of eastern Kentucky and Virginia miners lived in company towns, according to a congressional study quoted by Hall: U.S. Congress, Senate, Woman and Child Wage-Earners, 1: 520, 523.
12 Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 115-120.
13 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), p. 205.
14 Harriet L. Herring, Passing of the Mill Village: Revolution in a Southern Institution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), p. 26; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, p. 195. Hall offers a slightly higher figure: Drawing upon a congressional study, she says rents in 1908 averaged $3.57 per month, roughly 6 percent of workers’ total monthly expenditures. See p. 126.
15 Valerie Quinney, “Farm to Mill: The First Generation,” in Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc S. Miller (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 5-7.
16 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 432-433. W. J. Cash notes that child labor was the norm: “At six, at seven, at eight years, by ten at the latest, the little boys and girls of the mill families went regularly to work.” The Mind of the South, p. 203.
17 Hall et al., Like a Family, p. 130.
18 Anderson, The Social Consequences, p. 58-59; according to Hall et al., by 1910 most urban mills had converted to cheaper and more dependable electric power, but small-town and rural mills lagged behind. In the Carolinas, 75 percent of mills still ran on water or steam. Like a Family, p. 48.
19 Anderson, The Social Consequences, pp. 61-62; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, p. 99; “Cannon I,” Fortune, November 1933, p. 50.
20 Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis, p. 41.
21 James A. Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1933-1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), p. 31.
22 Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy, pp. 29-30.
23 Andrews, The Men and the Mills, p. 80; Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 105-106, 186-194; Anderson, The Social Consequences, p. 60.
24 Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 197-219.
25 Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1972), pp. 210- 211; Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy, p. 49; Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 290-294, 325, 329-332, 342; Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis, pp. 45-47.
26 Brecher, Strike! pp. 212-217.
27 Ibid., pp. 218-219; Hall et al., Like a Family, pp. 349-354.
28 Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1938), pp. 239-240.
29 Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 194.
30 Herring, Passing of the Mill Village, pp. 8-11; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, pp. 197-199.
31 “Cannon II,” Fortune, November 1933, p. 141. The same issue of Fortune (pp. 131-134), however, reported that Charles Cannon, who also served as a director of the Federal Reserve branch in Charlotte and on the board of New York Life Insurance, was
“the foremost figure in textiles” and that Cannon Mills “is the most secure if not the greatest textile company in the South.”
32 Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis, p. 115; Anderson, The Social Consequences , p. 64; Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1969.
33 Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1971.
34 Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1969; Andrews, The Men and the Mills, p. 249; Kannapolis: A Pictorial History, pp. 146-147.
35 Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1956; October 8, 1956; April 29, 1966. The Journal commented that, with four wage increases in less than two years, Cannon generally led the way in wages, and other textile companies followed that lead.
36 Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1974; July 24, 1974. Further votes failed in the 1980s and 1990s, before the textile union’s successor, UNITE, was victorious in 1999, becoming the bargaining representative for Pillowtex.
37 Andrews, The Men and the Mills, pp. 250-252, 287; Arthur-Cornett, Remembering Kannapolis, p. 91; Anderson, The Social Consequences, p. 69; Fieldcrest-Cannon Corp. and Pillowtex company history, www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Fieldcrest-Cannon-Inc-Company-History.html.
38 Kannapolis: A Pictorial History, pp. 247-248, 275.
Chapter 5:The Magic City
1 Robert Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 48-49; Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 43-44; the steel man’s quote appears in David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 88; Eugene J. Buffington, “Making Cities for Workingmen,” Harper’s Weekly, May 8, 1909, p. 15; Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1915), p. 165. Taylor’s book grew out of an article first published in The Survey . The magazine ran several pieces on steel towns as follow-ups to the Pittsburgh Survey, a social-scientific investigation of conditions in that town initiated by the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York and backed financially by the Russell Sage Foundation.
