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

Lou Martin’s Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia provides an in-depth study of rural working-class culture in Hancock County, West Virginia. An exhaustively researched book that draws on census records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and author interviews, Smokestacks in the Hills makes a significant scholarly contribution by placing rural people and places at the forefront of twentieth-century labor history.

The time frame of Martin’s book is expansive, tracing the transformation of Hancock County from a nineteenth-century agricultural region, to an upand-coming industrial area in the first half of the twentieth century, and then finally into a struggling factory zone starting in the late 1960s. The book opens by surveying Hancock County’s agricultural origins in an attempt to show the cultural imprint left by farm families. Martin strongly suggests that nineteenth-century farmers bequeathed to later rural-industrial workers a lasting faith in local autonomy and community self-reliance. Although this is an intriguing claim, the book only vaguely explains how these traditions were transmitted over time as the county experienced population turnover and demographic shifts due to industrialization.

Adding to the scholarly literature on corporate relocation, Martin shows how pottery and steel manufacturers responded to competition by moving factories to rural Hancock County in the early 1900s. Providing new insights into the nature of capital mobility, Martin argues that industrialists used the shift to the countryside to implement new technologies and to deskill their workforce. The book also depicts how industrial restructuring led to the formation of a distinct rural working class.

The narrative heart of the book covers the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Martin’s central argument is that rural-industrial workers failed to be incorporated into either the national labor movement or the New Deal coalition. While urban workers flooded into national unions like the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and voted for Democratic politicians, rural-industrial workers like those in Hancock County preferred to rely on their families, their communities, and even their employers to safeguard their welfare and resisted the allure of the CIO. Rural laborers also remained outside the New Deal order throughout the 1940s and 1950s, voting for “conservative politicians,” like the Republican Arch Moore, who favored placing “limits on union power” (p. 118).

According to Martin, localism accounted for rural workers’ repudiation of the national labor movement and New Deal liberalism. He argues that “rural working-class culture privileged place and local community over class” (p. 2). Displaying values inherited from nineteenth-century agrarians, workers in Hancock County “voiced suspicions of national unions and powerful union officials,” fearing that control would shift from local communities to “distant, impersonal bureaucracies” (p. 10). Rural workers favored independent unions that maintained the “local nature of labor relations” through “face-to-face communication” with management (pp. 92, 10). Independent organizations were seen as more responsive to local demands and, therefore, as more conducive to community autonomy.

Unlike urban laborers, who turned to the welfare state to provide a safety net, rural-industrial workers used their access to productive property to weather hard times. Drawing on the agrarian tradition of “making do,” working-class families supplemented their paychecks by growing produce in household gardens (p. 10). These rural “survival strategies tended to strengthen their localism and weaken their commitment to New Deal coalition goals such as a more robust welfare state and union protections” (p. 10).

While Martin’s emphasis on localism is generally persuasive, there are other explanations that the author overlooks. For a book that focuses on capital mobility, it is interesting that the author does not give much credence to the idea that rural workers rejected national labor organizations out of fear of factory relocation. Perhaps not participating in the labor movement was the...