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  • Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range, 1915–2000 by Jeffrey T. Manuel
  • John H. Barnhill (bio)
Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range, 1915–2000
. By Jeffrey T. Manuel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. 312. $27.95.

Taconite is inferior-quality iron-bearing rock—dross in the heyday of Minnesota’s iron range, the salvation of that range in the eyes of the Iron Rangers as it became a viable substitute for the dwindling hematite of the Mesabi and other iron areas. Jeffrey Manuel argues that taconite was closer to iron pyrite than to gold, and even gold would not have saved the iron [End Page 1015] range from the pressures of change and competition. All taconite did was delay the inevitable, buying time for a transition without providing a place to transition to.

Manuel’s work addresses the history of the iron range from the initial small-scale mining efforts through the massive open pits of the glory days when Minnesota gave American industry the iron it needed to create an economy with the strength of steel. As in all the extractive communities of the United States, labor and management were at odds more often than not, but the demand meant prosperity for both sides for generations.

Then the world changed. Minnesota iron was still available in great quantities but the end was in sight. The world supply of iron grew with new discoveries and new competitors who drove prices down for both hematite and, later, taconite. The iron wasn’t gone, just non-competitive. And taconite processing was much more machine intensive than hematite mining, so even the taconite dream came with the nightmare of a drastically diminished workforce, forcing the superfluous or superannuated hematite miners out of mining if not out of Minnesota altogether.

Environmentalists took their whacks at the open pits and the habit of one major taconite processor of dumping tailings into Lake Superior. The litigation that ensued was inconclusive, but it had impacts beyond the courtroom as it swayed public opinion and disenchanted those who were advocating economic development at any price.

Piling on, economic development agencies at various levels had no clue about how to turn the regional economy around. Desperately ridiculous ventures such as the manufacture of chopsticks were funded as alternatives to mining, but not even the more substantial ventures had the legs to replace mining. Desperation led to attempts to promote tourism, but staring at an open pit mine was entertaining only for so long, and there wasn’t all that much in the region. Historical restoration raised questions of which history and which period, and often turned into amusement park history or reinvention of the past. And jobs again were not nearly as secure or well-paying as mining.

As Manuel stresses, the iron range experience is not a stand-alone story. It includes the plight of not only extractive industries but also the old factories and mills that populate the rust belt. Desperate times produce desperate measures, but desperation is not a sufficient precondition to bring about success. Manuel doesn’t say so, but his work indicates that creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the capitalist process, still means that some jobs go under and never come back up again—buggy-whip makers in the auto age, for example.

This work began as a dissertation, but it overcame that and became a highly readable and sympathetic but neutral examination of a crisis period in the author’s home state. The photos help the reader to visualize the range, the technology, and the people. Beyond the recapturing of the history [End Page 1016] of the range in the twentieth century, important as that is, Taconite Dreams reminds those who have forgotten and informs those who never knew, of the downside of the postindustrial economy. Economists might praise the overall growth in gross domestic product, but that means nothing to those in the depressed microeconomies where people actually live. Whether in Bemidji or Detroit or Hoxie, Arkansas, after the loss of the shoe factory to a cheaper third world source, national per capita prosperity...

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