An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945–1972 (review)

Readers of historian Jerry Bruce Thomas' 1998 study, An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression, will recall his detailed treatment of economic hardship, New Deal policies, and conservative opposition in the Mountain State. Originally published by the University Press of Kentucky, it has been reprinted as a paperback by West Virginia University Press, timed to appear along with a worthy companion volume that covers, with equally insightful analysis, the three decades that followed.

An Appalachian Reawakening tackles the vexing issues of poverty and social marginalization that make the southern mountain region appear an exception to the postwar flowering of the American Dream. The number of topics Thomas addresses in his newest volume make it perhaps the most important general historical work on twentieth-century West Virginia since the ground-breaking books of John Alexander Williams.

The end of World War ii saw the social and economic transformation of on a region, a profound change that was most obviously exemplified in the mechanization of coal production. While other historians, notably Keith Dix, chronicled the impact of that transition, for Thomas it is the starting point for an historical narrative that encompasses most of what has transpired in the latter half of the century.

Throughout the 1950s, West Virginia, and the Appalachian region generally, seemed strangely exempt and immune to the prosperity and progress of the emerging consumer society. And yet, West Virginia was subject to the same struggles and issues that beset American society in that decade, as Thomas' discussion of the era of civil rights plainly illustrates. Despite the redefinition of racial relations, however, the region grew, if anything, more distinctive in contrast to the mythic, homogenized American nation of the mid-century.

This distinctiveness emerged in popular consciousness in full force during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the programs and policies of the New Frontier and the Great Society, most especially in the War on Poverty. As in his previous volume, Thomas weaves a detailed historical narrative of attitudes and actions accompanying these federal initiatives.

In a chapter on community activism, there is illuminating treatment of the mixed results of poverty warriors in Appalachian Volunteers and vista encountering local politics and changing social attitudes.

After addressing the impact of late '60s tumult, Thomas chronicles the eventual emergence of more indigenous movements of resistance, such as the labor rank-and-file insurgencies around Black Lung and democratization of the United Mine Workers of America, as well as the growth of women's dissent and activism.

The book concludes with the controversy of strip mining in the early 1970s and the Buffalo Creek disaster, origins of the current day environmental struggles over mountaintop removal and the continued political and economic of coal interests.

As with his title on the New Deal, Thomas' An Appalachian Reawakening performs the commendable task of not just showing us where we have been, but how and why we have gotten to where we are today.