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American tungsten producers did not share in the corporate gains that characterized much of the economy during the Roaring Twenties. Except for a few operators still working to fulfill old orders, tungsten mining in the United States virtually died in 1919 and did not revive for nearly five years. First of the larger operators to close was Pacific Tungsten. With a mismanaged mill, no operating capital, and a mountain of debt, it folded in January. Next to go was the Atolia mine in California, once the largest U.S. producer. It shut down the first of March. By June all of Colorado’s ferberite and wolfram mines had closed as well as the twenty-one mills that serviced them. Pacific Tungsten’s neighbor, the Nevada Humboldt mine, ran until July before it “was closed down by its creditors,” as an industry spokesman reported. Two months later the last major American firm, Tungsten Mines in the Bishop district, suspended operations after completing its contracts. Overseas the situation was not much better. Markets everywhere suffered from “over-production and accumulation of ore stocks.”1 Other metal producers revived after a brief recession in the early 1920s. Urban growth and rising demand for electricity, oil, steel, copper, aluminum, and other commodities stimulated markets worldwide and led to profound changes in the productivity and corporate structures of the largest metal and power companies. For small businesses, however, and especially for American miners and farmers outside the urban-industrial Northeast, the “decade of prosperity” was more chimerical than real.2 Most of the blame for the tungsten malaise fell on Chinese producers and traders who kept the American market saturated until the mid-1920s with wolfram concentrates produced at a third of the cost of American ore. Asian ore ruined the American tungsten industry, declared the Mining and Scientific Press in 1920. It urged a protective tariff to prevent the United States from falling to the “mercy of hostile nations, which could instantly cut off supplies.” FROM PACIFIC TUNGSTEN TO NEVADA-MASSACHUSETTS 3 44 T U N G S T E N I N P E A C E A N D W A R Resurgent calls for protection appealed to a postwar nation disillusioned by Wilsonian idealism and the cynical aftermath of war in Europe. As a corollary of isolationism, protectionism gained considerable momentum during the recession years of the early twenties.3 RELIEF LEGISLATION FOR STRATEGIC METAL PRODUCERS To financially strapped mining investors in the immediate postwar years, relief came before protection. W. J. Loring typified their distress in a frank remark to a Pacific Tungsten stockholder in 1919: “Absolutely no business is being done in tungsten, and we are moving heaven and earth to get some relief from the Government.” In March, while President Wilson was still in France wearing himself out with treaty negotiations, Congress passed the War Minerals Relief Act, otherwise known as the Dent Act after the Alabama Democrat who was its prime sponsor. It established the War Minerals Relief Commission with power to investigate claims and make recommendations to the secretary of the interior for distribution of $8.5 million provided under the act. As part of a bill to settle “informal army contracts,” the relief measure implicitly acknowledged the government’s liability for net losses suffered by producers of pyrites, chrome, manganese, and tungsten because of the abrupt cancellation of government contracts in November 1918. Advocates of these four “war babies” hailed it as a great victory. In the three months allowed for filing, 1,287 claims totaling more than $17 million were recorded, raising “some question as to the policy of payment,” as the American Mining Congress (amc) secretary dryly noted. Attorney General Palmer, however, drastically reduced the number by narrowly defining the act’s intent to apply only to those companies with specific contracts or written orders. The opinion caused an outcry, reflected in a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming it would cause the loss of “millions of dollars of relief to the small miner who is the backbone of the mining industry .” But the order stood, and the Sixty-sixth Congress, distracted by foreign affairs, deflected pressure to amend the law. More than half of the initial claims were tossed out, but the unhappy petitioners bided their time until a more amenable Congress could be persuaded to revisit the issue. They did not have long to wait. In the meantime the Relief Commission conducted hearings to gather evidence, called in investigators to check the...

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