An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression by Jerry Bruce Thomas (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY book devotes sections to the city’s labor history , including references to Eugene V. Debs. Roznowski even provides an account of the 1935 General Strike that shut down much of the city. In demonstrating Terre Haute’s commitment to social service, Roznowski pays homage to the Friendly Inn that gave many people a helping hand as well as the County Poor Farm. He might have enhanced this theme by including some discussion of the Terre Haute chapter of the Florence Crittenton Home, which provided assistance for single mothers. Terre Haute had the only Crittenton Home in the state, which linked the city to the national Progressive reform effort. An American Hometown raises a central question: Why study Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1927? Why this town, in this year? Roznowski claims that after 1927, Terre Haute lost its sense of community and self-sufficiency. In the introduction he blames the dwindling of the railroad and the nation’s decreasing dependence on coal for the steady decline of the city. There is certainly truth in these claims. However, other national forces—most notably Prohibition— contributed to Terre Haute’s decline before 1927. Prohibition hit Terre Haute and its thriving brewing trade particularly hard, and it also reverberated through the city’s glass bottling industry. Farmers around Terre Haute also felt the impact of agricultural problems in the early 1920s. In short, sectors of the city’s economy suffered before the onset of the Great Depression and the decline of the coal and railroad industries. Roznowski blames the loss of Terre Haute’s manufacturing on corporate leaders ’ desire to find non-union labor in other areas of the country. That certainly occurred but it provides only a partial explanation. The deindustrialization of manufacturing cities across the U.S. also contributed to Terre Haute’s economic woes. An American City helps illustrate the nature of local life in Terre Haute in 1927, but it leaves many questions unanswered. What do we gain from looking at Terre Haute? Was this city’s experience in 1927 representative of other cities in the Midwest, or was it the exception ? Establishing the national context and looking at the big picture might have helped Roznowski answer these questions. Though historians will find little here of note (perhaps beyond inspiration), Roznowski’s offbeat approach provides a good trip down memory lane for Terre Haute residents. Laura E. C. Bergstrom Ivy Tech Community College-Sellersburg An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression Jerry Bruce Thomas Jerry Thomas is an old-fashioned historian, and we should be grateful for that. While many historians have been doing localized community studies and parsing obscure popular culture, much of Appalachian and West Virginian history goes unwritten. During his career, Thomas has simply and quietly explained the major changes in the politics and economy of the state of West Virginia during critical eras. Thomas’s An Appalachian New Deal, first released in 1998, has become such a foundational study that when it went out of print West Virginia University Press acquired the rights and has now reprinted it substantially unchanged. The book outlines the political and economic BOOK REVIEWS FALL 2011 97 history of the Mountain State from the late 1920s through the election of 1940, a critical period in West Virginia history for a few reasons. First, these years witnessed the fall of the old Republican guard and the rise of a new Democratic statehouse machine that would dominate West Virginia politics for decades to come. Second, the New Deal revolutionized the state’s bureaucracies, although that revolution remained far from complete. Third, the state’s economy went through dramatic changes as miners unionized, mines mechanized, and family farms began to disappear. Thomas’s narrative revolves primarily around state politics and relief efforts. Local politics distorted and even obstructed orders sent down from the federal officials toWestVirginia. The fiscal conservatism of state legislators and governors prevented many New Deal programs from following the designs of their creators in Washington, let alone achieving the desired results. State politicians opposed any increases in taxes, feared the effects of welfare, and resented the attempts of the federal government to...