In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock that Changed the World (review)

There are many substantial works on the U.S. coal industry from the perspective of labor history, but few from the vantage point of business history. Dan Rottenberg's superb and concise volume fills this gap. His story is scholarly history written in a way that is easily accessible to the general public. Rottenberg gives us a narrative from both sides—labor and business—even if his focus is on the 200-year involvement of the Leisenring family in coal. He effectively draws from secondary sources, archival materials, and selected oral history interviews with managers and workers.

The book is divided into four parts that delineate the key eras of the American coal industry and the coinciding changes in the Leisenring family's business organization. Part I opens with the history of the origins of the coal mining industry in eastern Pennsylvania. Mauch Chunk (a local Indian name for bear) became the center of Leisenring operations in the early nineteenth century after the discovery that hard anthracite coal would burn long and clean to heat the homes of nearby Philadelphians. The Leisenring family and those who joined their new company, Lehigh Coal & Navigation (LC&N), had to develop not only the early technologies for mining coal, but also the essential transportation networks required to deliver it to urban markets. The rise of rail links that eventually displaced complicated canals and locks are as important to the account as the resource itself.

Part II focuses on the western Pennsylvania town of Connellsville near Pittsburgh. The story advances to the post-Civil War period, when steel began to displace iron, and coke (produced from soft bituminous coal) came into high demand. By the 1880s, the Leisenring group established operations in the town, but faced fierce competition from Henry Frick, who had the largest coking business and a steady customer in the leading steel producer, Andrew Carnegie. Once Carnegie managed to bring Frick directly under his business wing, Frick in turn could drive out smaller producers—and in the end the Leisenring company as well.

Part III tells how this apparent failure became a remarkable alternative success for the Leisenrings. Prior to the "war in the coke fields," the family bought mining rights to vast underground bituminous deposits in southwestern Virginia but abandoned plans to mine in the remote mountainous region because of the distance from steel centers such as Pittsburgh. They later discovered, however, that the quality of coal for coking in the Big Stone Gap region far exceeded Frick's in Connellsville, resulting in greater steel producer demand, which offset the transportation disadvantage. The Leisenrings facilitated rail transport construction (from three different directions), established modern town facilities and housing for miners, and brought in new, trained managers to run their operation. Their company eventually known as the Stonega Coal Company (linked also to Westmoreland Coal and Virginia Coal & Iron). The owners assumed that providing these benefits and relatively good wages for their workers would keep unions out, in particular the United Mine Workers (UMW), which already had organized most Northern fields and now was moving into neighboring West Virginia. They were wrong, of course, but they learned to live with the UMW and its president John L. Lewis because bargaining agreements eventually helped stabilize prices and work practices in the fragmented industry.

Rottenberg portrays the close relationship between the union hierarchy and Leisenring management by the 1950s as generally positive, and in some ways an exception in a volatile industry. But when Lewis died and his loyal and corrupt protégé Tony Boyle took over the UMW presidency, this arrangement had a dark side. Ted Leisenring Jr., now running the company, was shocked when he learned of Boyle's possible connection to the murder of UMW democratic opposition leader Jock Yablonsky and his family. Boyle, who already had a conviction for fraudulent use of union funds, eventually...