Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community During the Great Depression by Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary (review)

Norvelt, Pennsylvania, originally named Westmoreland Homesteads, was one of thirty-four communities in eighteen states built by the U.S. Department of the Interior's Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH) during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The DSH was created under the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 to provide assistance to economically distressed areas and stimulate recovery in home building. Historians Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary have written a history of the community based on local, state, and federal government records, magazine and newspaper accounts, demographic data, and voting returns. They also spent time there, gathering some thirty oral-history interviews with past and present residents and gaining a personal familiarity with the project's layout, houses, outbuildings, and public buildings.

Kelly, Power, and Cary reject the longstanding view that the community development program administered by the DSH was a failure or a wasteful political boon-doggle.¹ They instead present Norvelt as evidence of the program's efficacy and ability to transform down-on-their-luck families into middle-class, or almost middle-class, homeowners. Norvelt, they argue, has not only "survived but thrived" since 1934. It offers "tangible proof that federal intervention, when combined with a receptive, eager, and hardworking population, can succeed" (2). The program improved the economic and social circumstances of the participating families, so much so that many came to reject the political liberalism that made the project possible in the first place. Although the book was published before the 2016 presidential election, the earlier political behavior of the inhabitants of Norvelt suggests that they joined other voters in the region outside of metropolitan Pittsburgh in support of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump and platforms critical of federal involvement in housing and community development.

Norvelt residents who might have backed Trump because of his declared intent to restore the coal industry's former economic and political dominance evidently ignored or forgot that their community was built to address problems created by the deeply unequal distribution of wealth and power that the mining industry created in the region. Poorly compensated and mistreated by their employers, mining families before the New Deal relied on themselves, their churches, ethnic organizations, and the United Mine Workers of America union for mutual assistance. During the 1910s and 1920s, when the coal industry was at its most exploitative, the high levels of indebtedness, injury and disease, abuse and violence, and misery in the coal "patch" towns in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia attracted the attention of professional social workers employed by governmental agencies and charitable and self-help organizations. They found that mine laborers—typically migrants or immigrants—had few housing options other than the small, detached or semidetached, cheaply-built wood-framed dwellings available for rent or sale from their employers. Company-owned dwellings often lacked central heating, a water heater, an indoor toilet, and a convenient means of bathing. Some mining families supplemented their incomes by taking in boarders, further reducing their personal space and privacy. Then came the Great Depression.

President Roosevelt and advisers such as Columbia University economist Rexford G. Tugwell believed that granting relief or welfare payments to impoverished families harmed their sense of self-reliance and diminished their work ethic. Convinced that recent urban migrants ought to have an opportunity to return to the countryside, they created programs to help resettle them on productive land to pursue agricultural subsistence and cooperative production. Under the direction of Milburn L. Wilson, an agricultural economist, the DSH constructed a series of planned communities—mostly in the south and the west—to reinforce the dual values of individual initiative and mutual assistance.

The success of Norvelt and other...