Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields (review)

With the establishment of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH) in the mid-1990s, the history of Wales and its people has increasingly gained the attention of a much wider audience. This has resulted in the publication of a number of well-researched and informative studies, and to date there is a growing corpus of material relating to Welsh settlement patterns throughout Britain, Europe, America, Canada, Patagonia, Australia, and Africa. This literature has mapped the impact of religious exiles, economic migrants, politicians, women, and intellectuals. Arguably, however, the Welsh encountered fewer settlement problems than other ethnic groups and this has tended to mask their presence and their involvement in the making of American society. Yet the continuous presence of Welsh societies throughout the world, and particularly the industrial contribution of the Welsh, suggests that, despite their relatively small numbers and supposed invisibility, this Celtic people has had a discernible impact.

Ronald Lewis's richly illustrated study of Welsh immigrants to the coal-mining areas of North America, and the associational life they enjoyed, is an example of how this ethnic community expressed its cultural distinctiveness but also managed to assimilate quite quickly. The product of extensive research as well as a personal odyssey, Lewis's monograph charts the progress of these immigrants and complements the growing literature concerning the emergence of Welsh migration and industrial activity. Expanding on his earlier studies, Lewis offers the reader a vivid insight into the experiences of skilled Welsh immigrants and how they became involved in the major expansion of the American coalfields. The opening chapter provides a context for the uninitiated about Welsh history and the nature of migration, while chapters two and three investigate settlement patterns, networking, and how some Welshmen secured key positions within their local communities. As he observes, "Welsh nepotism thrived in mining towns, but only where there was a Welsh community, and the Welsh mine owners and managers were instrumental in determining whether those communities emerged in the first place" (89).

Lewis reflects upon the way the Welsh were able to offer effective leadership in these coalfield communities where life expectancy was dismally short. They promoted modernization and industrial reform. As chapter 5 charts, they were instrumental in the creation of professional inspectors and the Mine Safety Reform Movement which acted as a pressure group for change. Providing evidence from the Avondale mining disaster of 1886 where 110 colliers perished, Lewis reveals the extent of this tragedy both in written testimonies and in contemporary pictorial images. When the bodies were brought to the surface there were agonizing shrieks, and in the consequent jury report the dead men were described as "mouth open," "hand clinched," and "face bloated, and arms extended over his head" (162). Despite the passing of safety legislation and the best efforts of professional inspectors established after this tragedy, a second Avondale tragedy occurred in 1871 at the West Pittston shaft. Reviewing the demand for further safety legislation in Ohio, Illinois, and elsewhere, Lewis shows how the Welsh "found an avenue of upward mobility in mine safety" (188) as well as influencing the changes in legislation.

Chapter 7 investigates Welsh involvement in union management where Lewis notes that by the 1920s the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was a well-established organisation and "primed with the ideology of progress and success, Welshmen were strategically positioned within the industry and the union to personally benefit from the opportunities presented as well as to shape the direction of the labor movement" (249). In this excellent chapter he discusses the changing face of unionism from the 1880s onwards, including an assessment of John L. Lewis who has been equally regarded as a progressive labor leader and "a power-hungry despot" (276).

Welsh Americansalso exposes the way in which these immigrants assimilated into the wider American society, but still retained the vestiges of their cultural inheritance. In chapter 4 Lewis pays...