Justus S. Stearns: Michigan Pine King and Kentucky Coal Baron, 1845–1933 by Michael W. Nagle (review)

In the late nineteenth century, the United States experienced rapid transformations in both agriculture and industry that shaped the course of the nation. Historians have long acknowledged the role railroaders, senators, and big businessmen played in directing these changes, noting the actions of men like Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Less is known about the smaller businessmen or those who, according to historian Michael Nagle, were “captains of industry operating at the local and regional levels” and whose ambition and accomplishments, though small compared to Carnegies or Rockefellers, nonetheless aided in bringing the United States’ industrialization (2).

Nagle’s biography of Michigan lumber and coal baron Justus S. Stearns examines one such businessman. Stearns began his career as the owner of a Michigan lumber company in the 1880s. In the following decades, his business interests expanded to include railroads, coal, electricity, manufacturing firms, and hotels. By 1930, his empire reached into multiple states, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington (2).

According to Nagle, Stearns’s success came from multiple and at times conflicting points. Stearns upheld tenets of paternalism and Social Darwinism when dealing with his employees and was both a resident businessman invested in his local community and an absentee landowner elsewhere. These efforts, Nagle argues, demonstrate Stearns’s “success as a business entrepreneur” as well as “the positive impact Stearns had on the communities as each struggled to enter the industrial age” (4). This biography, which follows Stearns’s personal, business, political, and philanthropic life, sets out to demonstrate the extent of his contributions in modernizing rural towns throughout the nation.

Nagle covers Stearns’s life in eight chapters, with the first two chronicling his early life as the son of a farmer and his first investments in the Michigan lumber industry. Chapter 3 discusses his political career as a Republican influenced by the Progressive movement while the next several chapters focus on his business endeavors. The first of these business-themed chapters describes Stearns’s expansion of his lumber business into Wisconsin, primarily on American Indian reservations. Nagle is clear that Stearns’s Progressive views fell short when it came to dealing with lumber on reservation lands. Like many other businessmen of the period, he lied about timber quality to pay only a fraction of its worth and implemented two-tier payment systems that allowed white workers to earn cash wages while his American Indian workforce was paid in company scrip (102). As a result of these actions, as well as extensive corruption in the U.S. Department of Indian Affairs, Stearns became a wealthy man.

The money Stearns made through his Wisconsin investments enabled him to establish new lumber and coal companies in the eastern portions of Kentucky and Tennessee. Chapters 5 through 7 detail his work to make the Stearns Lumber & Coal Company the third-largest producer of coal in Kentucky in the 1920s. His involvement in the lumber, coal, and railroad industries in the region prompted him to found the company town of Stearns, Kentucky, where his son resided for several years. In addition to detailing his business interests, Nagle outlines Stearns’s philanthropic involvement in the region, as well as some of his labor disputes with his workforce in the early twentieth century. Nagle argues that while in Wisconsin Stearns acted as an absentee owner and extracted resources while giving little back he was far more paternalistic toward his Appalachian workforce. In fact, Nagle concludes that Stearns’s involvement in the area was “the dominant force that positively shaped the economic development and social life for families living in the northern portions of the Big South Fork area of Kentucky and Tennessee” (123).

The final two chapters focus on Stearns’s enterprises outside the lumber and coal industries and his legacy. Stearns owned or founded more than two dozen firms, ranging from electrical companies and hotels to several...