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

A declension narrative casts a long shadow over American labor history. Whether highlighting technological transformation, employer opposition, or the impact of divisive racial and gender cleavages, a generation of scholarship has detailed the ways in which declining private sector union density ushered in an era in which workers had far less power to effectively challenge their employers for either a voice at the workplace or a broader share of its profits. Built in to all of these accounts is the presumption that industrial workers were committed to making such challenges and to a broader social and political agenda through powerful unions and robust collective bargaining.

Lou Martin calls such assumptions into question. Through a careful study of twentieth-century Hancock County, West Virginia, Martin uncovers an intensively localized world of working-class formation and labor politics. Drawing on a rich combination of diaries, census data, newspapers, oral histories, court records, and personal and institutional manuscript collections, Martin illuminates the distinctive character and politics of rural industrialization in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bounded on both the north and the west by the Ohio River and on the east by the Pennsylvania state line, Hancock County was first settled in the mid-eighteen century. By the 1830s, the northern-most tip of the Virginia panhandle was a regional center of flour milling, producing forty-thousand barrels per year for sale in southern cities like New Orleans. Overproduction led to soil exhaustion and erosion, hastening a transition to a subsistence-plus agriculture that included the raising of sheep and the growing of apples for market.

The expansion of the railroads in the decades after the Civil War brought new national pressures to this regionally oriented agricultural production, eroding the Ohio Valley's delicate prosperity and thrusting the region into crisis at the same moment that entrepreneurs like Ernest Weir were seeking sites for new industrial investment. Frustrated with the rising costs of urban real estate, proliferating regulatory reforms, and increasingly explosive labor conflicts, Weir and others came to see large rural settings as a "blank canvas" where they might realize substantial profits through an idealized combination of technological innovation and a cheap, pliable workforce. Located across the river from East Liverpool, Ohio, a crucial center of nineteenth century pottery production, and less than fifty miles from the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the rolling landscape of Hancock County was ideally situated for the construction of a rural industrial utopia. In the 1920s and 1930s, the companies pushed through technological innovations that further reduced the role of skilled work and shifted production to relatively simple and repetitious labor. In so doing, they drew on the seemingly endless supply of native-born migrants and poor immigrants, who in turn brought their "rural habits" with them to small factory towns like Chester, Newell, and Weirton.

For Martin, the availability of cheap land distinguished the experience of rural industrialization from its urban counterpart: "With access to land, lax regulations, and few reformers to disapprove, the rural-industrial workers of Hancock County planted gardens, raised livestock, hunted and fished, and produced a substantial portion of their own food supply" (76). The self-help practices used by Hancock's growing number of semi- and unskilled workers eased their transition to industrial society while also ensuring that it was less a complete departure than a complex adaptation from older ways. Beyond food production, such approaches were manifest in collective home construction and a decidedly communal approach to charity and welfare.

This subsistence-plus industrial work provided an important source of support during the Great Depression and helped to shape workplace class politics in Hancock County during the postwar era. Never as deeply deprived or devastated, Hancock County's rural industrial workers shared few of the immediate needs and grievances of their urban counterparts. As urban industrial workers flocked to the militant, national unions of the Congress of...