Letter: More on "Coal Towns"

Letter: More on "Coal Towns" To the Editor: Crandall Shifflett's recent book, Coal Towns: Life, Work and Culture in Company Towns ofSouthern Appalachia, 1880-1960, is, in my view, one of the most seminal studies of Appalachian life and culture made in the last twenty years. Similarly challenging have been David Whisnant's All That Is Native and Fine, Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind, Altina Waller's Feud, and John Inscoe's Mountain Masters. But none of these studies penetrates to the core of the problems the Appalachian region has suffered from quite the way Shifflett's Coal Towns does. Yet the answers provided by Shifflett are not so convincing that this book becomes a "classic" as years ago John C. Campbell provided in The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, or as Ronald Eller provided for a time in Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, or even the pre-Civil War historical review provided recently by Robert Mitchell's edited volume, Appalachian Frontiers. Most of the reviews of Shifflett's book thus far have not caught this book's major significance. For example, Joe W. Trotter's brief review in Appalachian Journal (Summer 1992) is overly vague and noncommital, perhaps because Professor Trotter objects to Shifflett's clear attack on "labor historians." Trotter does, however, accept the book as a "contribution to scholarship," along with the books of David Corbin, Ronald Lewis, and Ronald Eller. In truth, Shifflett pointedly rejects the picture of coal-town life as presented by these "labor historians" as much too bleak. As Professor Shifflett himself noted at the Weatherford Award luncheon in May 1992 (see the Summer 1992 issue of Appalachian Heritage), he took his major inspiration from Eugene Genovese, John Blasingame, and other students of the slave community, who were able to see, understand, and even appreciate the life that developed in an admittedly inhumane system. Shifflett in no way "did a number on coaltown culture," difficult as that life was, though most previous studies have done just that. Shifflett's attempt to understand coal-town life on its own terms clearly results in a picture quite at variance from the one presented by Corbin, Lewis, and Eller. My colleague and friend, Tom Boyd, reviewed Coal Towns for you in Appalachian Heritage (Spring 1992). In what was a quite sympathetic review, Boyd, a sociologist, noted especially that Shifflett saw that 19 various voluntary associations of miners antedated any significant success of mine unionism. But this subject is one that Shifflett pursues for only two or three pages (pp. 113-115), and meanwhile he ignores all preUMW mine unions. On the other hand, Boyd particularly appreciated two points that Shifflett does emphasize—his analysis of the continuing effects of migration, and the fact that Shifflett presents coal-town life as not particularly alienating. Shifflett does strongly make the point that miners were highly migratory . Prior to the early 1920s the average miner seldom spent more than a few years in a single coal town. And later during the Great Depression and the final phase of the coal towns as Shifflett analyzes them (1930-1960), the miner's mobility was not entirely absent, thus giving him some clout with the mineowner. The oral history evidence that Shifflett consulted claims that mine labor was not really alienated. In fact, many miners appreciated coal-town life. Finally, on this point, Professor Shifflett pursues the phenomenon of the lack of interest in the union by a significant minority of miners even during crisis times. Why was there such a serious and continuing conflict between union and nonunion miners? (pp. 118, 138-140, 142-144) David Corbin in the October 1992 issue of the American Historical Review, presents a thoughtful, informed but basically critical review of Coal Towns. Corbin is particularly critical of the book's generalizations, and he believes that the Shifflett book fails as a revisionary work since it recounts "only what was good about the towns, and leaves out the bad; the deadly mine explosions, the unsanitary conditions, the mine guard system . . . black lists and housing contracts . . ." (p. 1292) Furthermore , Corbin contends that we need to remember that there were two distinctly different coal camp cultures...