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

A 1947 U.S. Department of Interior survey of coal miners' living conditions reported on "striking contrasts" between the run-down, substandard homes in patch (mining) communities that had been established for workers by coal companies and the clean, modern "privately owned homes" of other coal workers (174-5). This government study failed to report—and perhaps to recognize—that those "privately owned homes" were part of the southwestern Pennsylvania community of Norvelt, a federally-funded and designed subsistence homestead project established thirteen years before, at the dawn of the New Deal. Norvelt (its name a contraction of Eleanor Roosevelt) stood for the authors of this government study as a model of individual initiative and hard work rather than an example of how federal support could help people climb out of the mines and into the middle class.

Such ironies abound in Hope in Hard Times, a study of Norvelt's history that extends from the immigrant backstories of its inhabitants to the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, in which Norvelters chose the Republican candidate for the third time in a row. This careful, thoughtful, and deeply empathetic account by historians Timothy Kelly, Margaret Power, and Michael Cary challenges the generally negative historical appraisals of the subsistence homesteads program. It focuses on the lived experience and recollections of Norvelt residents, who remain nostalgic about the New Deal even as they mythologize their community's history and critique federal programs that benefit people of color. Kelly, Power, and Cary conclude that Norvelt is evidence that "in hard times of economic crisis and desperation, bold projects that offer people work, dignity, community, and hope have been and can be imagined, planned, and attempted. And they can succeed" (198).

Hope in Hard Times unfolds in eight short chapters, the first three of which offer the backstory to Norvelt's founding. The story begins with the history of the coal industry in southwestern Pennsylvania, where magnate Henry Clay Frick's Westmoreland County operation proved particularly unhealthy and repressive, even by Gilded Age standards. Westmoreland County's miners, primarily Catholic immigrants from southern and western Europe, joined the United Mine Workers but won few victories. The Great Depression hit miners particularly hard, and the book's description of their struggle to survive, and the pervasive hunger, malnutrition, and illness in mining communities is especially powerful. Herbert Hoover's capital-focused recovery measures did little for miners, but Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal brought hope.

Although they briefly address broader New Deal relief and recovery efforts, particularly those related to organized labor, the authors focus on the establishment of the subsistence homesteads communities under the National Industrial Recovery Administration. Supported by Alabama Senator John H. Bankhead II and directed by Iowan Milburn Lincoln Wilson, the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Department of the Interior sought to relocate poor farmers and industrial workers to new communities where they would be free of the city's corrupting influence and would grow their own food and build community. Quaker activist Clarence Pickett took charge of the homesteads for stranded industrial workers, and Norvelt—then called the Westmoreland Homesteads—was one of those efforts.

The book's four central chapters show that the Westmoreland Homesteads' founding and layout represent a "tension between a cooperative and an individualist ethos" (77). Pickett encouraged community study clubs in which residents learned about and promoted cooperative economic initiatives, healthcare, and social organizations (77). Westmoreland Homesteads' carefully selected new residents moved into the community in 1935, and they quickly fell into disputes over whether to mandate cooperation among community members. The community's cooperative store and health-care initiative floundered, and soon outside critics of New Deal social planning began to exaggerate and inflame existing tensions in the community. Yet for all their infighting, Norvelt's residents stayed put...