Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890–1930s (review)

Known for its mountains, smallholders, coal, and natural gas, West Virginia and Appalachia were also home to some of the nation's key glassworks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Breaking the industry down by type (tableware, window glass, and bottle glass) and examining towns representative of these different sectors, Ken Fones-Wolf's excellent and synthetic new book considers how workers and employers jockeyed for position in this geographically distinctive and capital-constrained region. Analyzing its political economy, he dispels myths about both its complete dependence on outside capital (its status as a dependent, peripheral location) and the homogeneity of its political environments. Not surprisingly, technological innovation played an important role.

The late-nineteenth-century reorganization of glass production, designed to take advantage of new supplies of raw materials, helped transform West Virginia into a major player in the trade. Firms relied on collective pricing and wage settlements, trust formation, and cooperative ownership to achieve what some described as a "dual monopoly." Such regulatory unionism made for a positive, if not always stable, relationship between workers and employers. In some cases, as in Clarksburg, West Virginia, it created a so-called "workers' paradise." Native and immigrant—especially Belgian—skilled workers, often organized into craft unions including Knights of Labor local assemblies, migrated to these centers where higher ratios of male to female labor prevailed than in Europe. High-tariff dependency in these trades made many workers very friendly to the "development faith" of the Republican Party linking high wages to protection. While confronting overproduction during periods of depression, glassworkers swung these communities from the Democratic Party.

In this context, I would have welcomed further discussion of the higher percentage of males working in the American glass industry as compared to Europe. In other trades such as pottery, skilled male workers explicitly linked their support for the tariff and the GOP with their success as male heads of household—that is to say, with their success as men. Was this also the case in glass? Furthermore, it might be useful to explore why the Knights of Labor remained such players in this industry while all but disappearing from most others.

The shift to more mechanized production and the continued national restructuring of the industry helped transform relations in West Virginia's several glass centers. This restructuring included both increased production due to new machinery and, consequently, the decline of the dual monopoly inherent in regulatory unionism. This was especially true in both bottle making and window glass, where new production techniques radically altered skills. Were these accompanied by shifts toward scientific management? That is not clear from the text, and I would like to know more on that front. Similarly, were some of these changes a response to federal antitrust actions in the window glass trades? More information here might have linked the changes in West Virginia to broader national shifts in political economy. In any event, the decline in status among workers in the industry led to a turn away from the Republicans for many with a rise in Socialist Party and Democratic Party activity. What triumphed was not, however, progressivism; rather, the culture of low-tax, low-wage, and nonunion work in the state's extractive industries provided a basis for marginal industrial growth.

World War I marked a moment of protected growth in these trades, while the postwar years saw the tableware trades do relatively well, albeit with weak unions and declining wages, while the window glass and bottle workers experienced deskilling, decline, and destabilization. As capital-intensive mechanized production increased, local firms increasingly consolidated under national ownership or else went out of business. While the Great Depression brought hard times and a relative decline in capitalization and innovation, the New Deal offered opportunities for unionization and, during the National Industrial Recovery Act period, renewed price stabilization. Tableware remained largely stable, with conservative business unionist organizations...