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Preface to the Paperback Edition In 2008, ten years after it had first appeared, the original edition of An Appalachian New Deal, following the typical cycle for an academic book, went out of print, leaving it largely unavailable in bookstores or at online dealers. At about the same time, I began to receive more inquiries about the book than I had during its in-print life. The reason for the renewed interest, of course, was the economic downturn that began in 2007, a slide that seemed shockingly similar to the Great Crash of 1929, an event that the New Deal reforms presumably had made obsolete. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, in the interest of deregulation, Congress eliminated many of the financial and banking regulations of the New Deal, some of which might have moderated or prevented the recent downturn. In any case, with the new economic crisis, the worst since the 1930s, people wanted to compare the present with the past and to seek the lessons of history. Of course history never repeats itself exactly, and the eight decades since the Great Crash of 1929 have made the United States, West Virginia, and Appalachia very different places with some problems similar to that bygone era but with other issues that would have been inconceivable in 1929. Also, some vestiges of the New Deal era, such as social security and unemployment insurance and other aspects of countercyclical economic policy make it unlikely that the current recession will reach the depths of the depression of the 1930s, a time when unemployment in Lincoln and Wayne, counties dependent on subsistence agriculture, reached 84 and 70 percent. The coal mining counties Raleigh, Mercer, Marion, and Mingo all had more than 40 percent unemployed. Public employees throughout the state such as policemen, firemen, and schoolteachers sometimes had to work without pay as municipalities and the state fell short of funds to pay all their obligations. Some school districts Preface ix dismissed women teachers, preserving teaching jobs for men, based on the notion that men were heads of families, and women just worked for pin money. State administrators slashed school and college budgets. Many retail businesses had to close their doors. County poor farms filled to overflowing, and private charities like the Red Cross and Community Chest had insufficient funds to meet the needs of the unemployed. Another characteristic of the Great Depression which we would hope to avoid in the current or future recessions is its persistence. Though the New Deal in West Virginia provided much-needed help to those who suffered most, helped vanquish nearly medieval forms of welfare such as county poor farms, encouraged the growth of professional social work, established the setting that allowed working men and women to organize, and built many roads, bridges, and public buildings still in use today, it failed to bring complete economic recovery before World War II. This reprinting has made it possible to correct errors in spelling or misprints that somehow slipped through the original editing, but it is not a rewriting and therefore incorporates no new research. The basic content remains as originally published in 1998. As I noted in the original introduction, my goals were to write a brief narrative synthesis about West Virginia during the Depression era that would be useful to students and interested readers and to put the story in a regional and national context so that it might contribute to the emerging literature about the era in Appalachia. I also hoped it might contribute as well to the state and city studies that added depth to the understanding of the New Deal’s impact. Reviewers generally recognized that the book fulfilled those goals. Taking as my model other state and local histories of the New Deal, I focused a good bit on government and politics, tracing the internecine struggle in the state between the more conservative statehouse Democrats and the proNew Deal federal Democrats, a conflict which is part of the broader story of the nature of the federal system and the kind of constraints Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Dealers faced in seeking to bring change to the country. Also, mindful of the experiences of my parents (to whom this book is dedicated) and their generation, I sought to tell the important story of what happened to ordinary people as they faced the challenges of the Depression. Some reviewers, not [18.216.32.116] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11:06 GMT...

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