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1 A New Machine Age in the Hills
- West Virginia University Press
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1 A New Machine Age in the Hills A machine age twilight has settled over the coal hills . . . There, . . . a region of small farmers was made momentarily prosperous by a sudden invasion of industry; then the wave passed, leaving them spoilt for the old way of life and helpless to face the new. Here, in miniature, is a cycle which technology seems to be working out in America at large. Malcolm Harrison Ross, Machine Age in the Hills, 1933 A lot of people in the rest of the country think that Appalachia has never caught up with the times, but this isn’t true . . . The problems in Appalachia are largely the result of progress rather than stagnation—of a superbly advanced technology rather than a primitive technology. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Appalachian Labor Conference, 1964 The nation generally prospered in the 1950s, a decade later described by historians with such superlatives as “amazing” and the “Biggest Boom Yet.”1 Lingering pent-up demand from the war period, technological advances, the development of many new industries, growth of great urban centers, and increasing exports combined to produce a rising prosperity. As the economy expanded with a steady growth rate of 4.7 percent, the standard of living improved remarkably, if unevenly . Despite three mild recessions, personal income rose to record levels by the end of the decade. Looking back over the 1950s from the perspective of 1963, economic historian Harold Vatter wrote that the remarkable capacity of the American economy represented “the crossing of a great divide in the history of humanity.” Such productivity , Vatter suggested, offered the hope that “poverty can be eliminated in the near future.”2 Even the once benighted South of the Depression era existed only in memory, as “a modern economic infrastructure” 10 A New Machine Age in the Hills made up of services, manufacturing, and trade dwarfed the old colonial economy of the region.3 In West Virginia and Appalachia, however, the forces that transformed the national economy had perverse impacts, undermining rather than uplifting, and the prospect of eliminating poverty receded rather than advancing. At the end of the decade, the Ford Foundation joined with colleges, universities, and churches in the region to investigate the matter, starting with the simple, understated premise that “over a period of time, the Appalachians have come to be recognized as a definite problem in the national economy.”4 At about the same time, at the beginning of the 1960s, Harry Caudill, an eastern Kentucky lawyer and state legislator, gave eloquent voice to the predicament of Appalachia, “this paradox of medieval stagnation in the midst of twentieth century prosperity and progress,” in his devastating and highly readable Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, marred only by an ungenerous portrait of the long-suffering residents of the area.5 Caudill focused on the Appalachian counties of eastern Kentucky, but the same kind of night came to West Virginia, the one state completely within Appalachia, and for much of the metropolitan press, the Mountain State, an “American paradox,” epitomized the Appalachian contradiction to the national prosperity.6 During the post–World War II period, at nearly every turn, new technologies created dilemmas and dangers for workers and residents, and though Appalachia was in some ways on the cutting edge of the technological revolution, it failed to share in the general prosperity that swept the country, even as the region supplied much of the energy that fueled the Great Boom, and the “sweat, muscles, and backs” of Appalachian migrants provided much of the labor that helped to sustain it.7 The new machine age would also offer an irresistible siren lure to the leadership of the United Mine Workers of America, drawing the union away from its reformist and militant tendencies of the Depression era (which had offered some countervailing force to powerful corporate interests) and, through diminution of its membership, undermining its hard-earned political clout. John L. Lewis and the union leadership cynically ignored the dangers the new machines posed to workers’ health as the price of a new arrangement with management and also as part of the price for saving the industry. The rank and file would retreat for a time into a judicious 11 A New Machine Age in the Hills silence, quietly acquiescing to forces beyond their control.8 Despite it all, West Virginians and Appalachians generally shared in the mass culture of the age, including the advance of automobiles and television , and...