AN APPALACHIAN NEW DEAL: WEST VIRGINIA IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION

1. On the Eve

1 On the Eve Editors and commentators in West Virginia newspapers and journals met 1929 with the kind of hyperbole that was typical of the twenties. In the West Virginia Review, a statewide monthly business journal, Commissioner of Labor Howard S. Jarrett claimed that the records for the past year would disclose"a period of growth unprecedented in the state's history." The outgoing governor, Howard Mason Gore, took satisfaction in the "marvelous changes" in the state during the twenties , and the incoming governor, William Gustavus Conley, promised "a progress and development during the year 1929 rarely experienced in years past."1 It had long been the style of West Virginia business and government leaders to speak of business in glowing terms and to ignore or to obscure inconvenient or painful realities.2 Beyond the formulaic incantations of boosterism, however, lay deep concerns. Even before the fall of 1929, the conventionally recognized date for the beginning of the Depression, crises plagued almost every sector of the state's economy, including the coal industry, agriculture, timber, banking, and construction. West Virginia, nevertheless, had shared in the modernizing transformations of the decade, which had led to improved communications and transportation, broader commercial and cultural opportunities, and increasingly complex organization and bureaucratization in both the public and private spheres. Gore (1925-1929) and Conley (1929-1933) were the last two governors of a lengthy Republican era. Since its beginning in 1897, coal, railroad, power, and chemical companies with out-of-state headquarters had come to dominate the state economically and politically. This protracted Republican reign had been interrupted only by the wartime governorship of a conservative Democrat, John Jacob Cornwell (1917-1921). While Republican regimes elsewhere had promoted progressivism during the first decade of the century, the West Virginia On the Eve 7 Republicans generally served the interests of the economic powers of the state, although they occasionally paid lip service to progressive concepts.3 Like much of West Virginia's twentieth-century history, the twenties have received little critical attention from state historians. A recent notable exception is John Hennen's The Americanization ofWest Virginia , which analyzes the period 1916 to 1925, emphasizing the efforts of state elites to inculcate"Americanization," a doctrine that promoted support of both American intervention in World War I and industrial capitalism.4 Just as state leaders sought to keep West Virginia in the mainstream of the nation's social, economic, and political currents during the wartime and postwar periods, they also shared the heady atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties as the state underwent some remarkable changes. The size and cost of government grew substantially as the probusiness Republican regime of the twenties, more inclined to neo-mercantilism than laissez faire, provided more public services such as building, maintaining, and policing a system of highways; expanding the department of public safety; building up a state agricultural bureaucracy; overseeing a state system of worker's compensation; increasing the functions of the state auditor; expanding the department of mines; and supporting numerous health and educational institutions . In response to women's suffrage and in acknowledgment of other Republican constituencies, the regime put together the elements of a state welfare system with the establishment of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, a Veterans' Service Officer, and the State Board of Children's Guardians. The regime also undertook the building of a costly new capitol on the banks of the Kanawha in east Charleston. Though some of these efforts were sparingly funded, they nevertheless indicate a willingness to expand the power of state government. Part of the motivation, no doubt, was that the patronage generated by expansion provided a means to reward faithful supporters.5 An important consequence of the expansive mood of the twenties was an increase in public debt. The state and its subdivisions paid for new schools, government buildings, and roads with proceeds from bonds, taking on what seemed at the time a reasonable burden of debt. When personal and corporate incomes declined and then, in some cases, collapsed in 1927 and afterward, something of a mood of tax revolt against "the high cost of government" grew.6 8 An Appalachian New Deal Because many West Virginians depended either directly or indirectly on mining and farming, the concurrent problems of the coal industry and agriculture set the stage for the Depression in the state well before the infamous crash. Coal mining employment peaked in 1923...