The Front Lines of Energy Policy: The Coal Mining Workplace and the Politics of Security in the American Century

In April 1977 Jimmy Carter detailed the energy crisis facing the nation in a televised address. Many Americans doubted a "real" energy crisis even existed. Carter, however, insisted that the crisis was not only real but a severe, long-range, even existential threat to the nation. To meet the challenge, he argued, would demand a response that was "the moral equivalent of war."¹ Conjuring war only two years after the final withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam was a fraught proposition. If the recent past weighed heavily, the language of war nonetheless invoked a longer history of entanglements between domestic energy use and war making, and a more contemporary but nonetheless ubiquitous political culture that imagined national security as deeply entwined with the everyday energetic lives of American citizens.² Carter's invocation of war, however, signaled not military conflict but energy transition. Just as wood had given way to coal, and coal to oil and natural gas, the time had come to transition again: to a coal regime characterized by both conservation and growth that would operate as a bridge to an alternative energy future.

Carter understood policy-directed energy transition would be a massive undertaking, not a matter of tinkering with regulations, but of completely transforming a nation, its people, and its culture. Certainly, the energy crisis was bound up with efforts by Third World oil producers to assert their own sovereignty and international influence.³ But it was also a profoundly domestic problem, calling into question the politics of postwar liberalism, which pursued national stability through economic growth, the more-measured extension of welfare systems, and the global projection of American power, culture, and political economy.⁴ He more likely intended to call forth World War II: the "good" war against which Vietnam was positioned in US politics. The war mobilization that lasted from the late 1930s until the middle of the next decade had taken on mythic qualities in American life. The imagined ability to provide the nation with a sense of unified moral purpose in confronting the domestic problems of war making—particularly the rationing of resources— figured centrally in this story, even as it obscured the same labor and cultural conflicts that would reemerge in the 1970s.⁵ This comparison also suggested the importance of domestic industrial workplaces in "winning" the energy war. If the energy crisis presented an existential crisis, it could not be fought on existential terrain.

Coal miners, their union, and coal industry leaders located both the nation's energy problems and their solutions in a peculiar kind of conflict zone: the coal mining workplace. In particular, the United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the vast majority of US coal miners in the midtwentieth century, positioned coal mines as the front lines of energy policy. This position on the front lines elevated their workplace claims even as coal's traditional importance in war making declined by suggesting that they bore the burdens of nation's energy policy disproportionately, and in a manner that supported national security. Miners and their representatives further buttressed these claims by portraying coal miners as white and masculine despite the fact that women, Black, Chicano, and Indigenous miners continued to play a significant role in coalfield politics.⁶ The form of energy security espoused by Carter in 1977 was intelligible, in part, as a result of a series of contestations over security that had taken place in the coal industry since the early 1950s, mostly in the coal mining workplaces east of the Mississippi River.

Coal mines are small spaces, whether you are looking at them on a map of the United States or you are crouched in a narrow seam, operating a roof bolter. In the United States, they are overwhelmingly located far from the population centers powered by coal-fired electricity. Yet in these small spaces, carboniferous geologic strata are imbued with cultural meaning and political power through their entanglement with the energy regimes that govern them. Most Americans will never see a coal mine, let...