Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin (review)

Lou Martin’s new book effectively uses a case study of a single West Virginia county to explore the broader implications of rural industrialization in the twentieth century. The volume provides a fascinating counterpoint to high-profile studies of labor organizing in cities, especially Elizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Martin argues that despite conditions in the local steel and pottery industries similar to that of urban centers, lower rates of unionization and a stronger emphasis on local control of decision-making among workers in Hancock County emerged from a rural context that favored protecting a “small measure of stability in the chaotic world of industrial restructuring” (180). Key to this process was the notion of “making do” through strategies such as growing large gardens and hunting game that were only possible within a more pastoral setting (10).

The first half of the book focuses on the rise of rural-industrial workers in the rugged countryside across the Ohio River from Steubenville, Ohio, and forty miles west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Emphasizing an initial mix of subsistence and market farming along with a political sensibility primarily concerned about “powerful outside agents that could erode their local control,” Martin paints a picture of mutually dependent community members bound by ties of both economy and kinship (25). The arrival of big industry in the form of steelman Ernest T. Weir and potter Homer Laughlin built on this localism as managers sought to cultivate a docile workforce free of labor strife. Cities, Weir declared of his decision to build a new tinplate mill on a stretch of former farmland, “if not breeders, were certainly magnifiers of discontent among workers” (54). As in urban areas, executives substituted technology for skill, creating a proletariat and swelling the county’s population, from less than seven thousand in 1900 to more than 28,500 three decades later. Whether from Eastern Europe or the failing farms of Appalachia, however, new workers often maintained a rural sensibility that combined the routine of industrial production with other money-making activities enabled by access to land.

After establishing the basic framework of Hancock County’s political economy, Martin explains how local residents weathered constantly changing labor relations brought on by technological shifts, the deskilling of work, and new labor laws of the 1930s. While there was a preexisting tradition of craft unionism in the potteries, the New Deal challenged Weirton Steel’s fierce antiunionism. Martin acknowledges the systematic violence and intimidation employed by steel executives, but also seeks a more nuanced understanding of why a large majority of workers voted against joining the United Steelworkers in 1950 in favor of a locally controlled Independent Steelworkers Union described by one observer as “ineffective, compromised, and self-lacerating” (104). In both politics and labor, rural residents continued to value local control and community harmony over more abstract notions of class interest—an attitude that resulted in support for Republican congressman Arch Moore even when his positions conflicted with the state’s labor leaders. Indeed, Martin argues that personal and community identity emerged as much away from the workplace as it did from the shop floor. The book’s final chapter carries the story through the 1960s and 1970s as antidiscrimination laws opened up new opportunities for women and African Americans even as foreign competition and capital movement exposed the impossibility of maintaining truly local arrangements.

Martin is particularly effective at teasing compelling conclusions about the nuances of local culture out of the subtleties of census records and oral histories. His analysis weakens as he attempts to bring the story past 1970 in an era where local power arrangements proved difficult to sustain in the face of larger political and economic pressures. Weirton Steel’s unique and initially successful Employee Stock Ownership Plan, which seemed to depend upon the very relationships the book highlights, deserved...