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99 C H A P T E R F I V E Industry The Angry, Fading District Thirteen: The Demise of Soft Coal Mining u “at the mine mouth: these men know death intimately above ground and below ground.” —sherwood anderson, Puzzled America (1935) “i think iowa mining is about to a close.” —anonymous iowa coal miner, circa 1930 nder the iowa cornfields near madrid, over four hundred coal miners struggled to load the day’s tons. one of the miners, george Kruich, followed his miner’s lamp as he braced the tunnel roof in scandia mine, while two italian miners, Joe ronetti and John Biondi, picked and shoveled the coal, sometimes on their backs as they listened to the constant coal cars stacatto away. two fields—one corn, one coal—lay not beside each other but one on top of the other. two layers of iowa production representing the two largest industries in 1930 had both begun a transformation of mechanization and technological efficiency in the early twentieth century with hybrid corn rapidly growing in iowa’s economy but soft coal quickly fading.1 Both midwestern farmlands and coal fields had suffered from early depressions during the 1920s caused by the economic aftermath of the great war, but the iowa coal industry would be especially hard hit in 1926, and it could never quite recover. in 1917, iowa counted 15,464 coal miners—by 1930, only 7,759. as a Des Moines Register editor asked in 1930 of the perhaps permanent changes in the coal industry: “will we learn anything?”2 and yet during the depths of the Depression the two resources crossed, and a rumor of economic survival circulated—iowans had begun burning the depression dilemmas of rural Iowa, 1929–1933 100 corn instead of coal. farmers near iowa’s Clear lake, as Caroline Bird comments in her Depression-era history, The Invisible Scar, “burned their corn for fuel rather than take scrip for it.” other historians have also noted this phenomenon—a strange symbolic irony of the great Depression’s worsening conditions. or, as the Des Moines Register simply called it, “anarchy.”3 which to burn? Corn was worth so little on the market by the early 1930s that it seemed cheaper to burn rather than the higher-priced coal. this “coal versus corn” dilemma existed not just as a heavily exaggerated myth because the iowa engineering experiment station began conducting serious comparative experiments that fall of 1932, determining that forty bushels of iowa corn equaled a ton of iowa coal and ten acres of corn could heat an average house for a winter. of course, corn would not hold a fire overnight and could attract rodents, but at least the accumulated ash and clinkering of coal briquettes would be limited. although iowa state College scientists received compliments for their unique research efforts, the burning of corn did not solve anyone’s problems—the farmer or the miner.4 in 1930, with 7 percent of the world’s population, the united states consumed 36 percent of the world’s coal. within industries and homes, coal was still needed to provide the necessary energy for heating, manufacturing, and transportation. But old King Coal was no longer a merry old soul, if he had ever been one, when the Depression dilemma posed two equally difficult problems, as historian richard lowitt has phrased the position: “the miner received too little, the consumer paid too much.”5 looking back at the development of iowa’s mining industry, as early as 1865 coal mines became well-established with 31 counties selling 66,667 tons of coal that last year of the Civil war. By 1870, iowa produced 1.5 percent of all coal mined in the nation; by 1880, it was 3.5 percent with 3 million tons. state mine inspectors noted in 1884 that “the coal trade was good at this time” and “the outlook for the industry was favorable.”6 and iowa’s District thirteen also produced its share of coal-mining personalities . Back in 1890 near the iowa coal town of lucas, a ten-year-old boy began sorting coal by hand one morning in a dreary building with coal dust staining the windows while dozens of other young boys also sifted coal as it streamed by on the conveyor. During spare moments this particular ten-year-old would look outside at the piles of coal slag and all its waste, vowing, “if he could, he would some day...

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