by Steven Stoll
16. Referring to a strike among mine workers throughout the bituminous coal regions of Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, one observer explained, “The causes which led up to the strike were various; but at bottom it was due to one,—the constant reduction in wages through several years, which had brought the miners and their families to the verge of starvation.” Wages per week ran from $3.00 to $4.00. Rent on company house: $2.00 to $2.50 per month. One coal company reported paying 39 men a total of $228.98 for two weeks, or $2.87 per man, per week. See George, “The Coal Miners’ Strike of 1897,” 186–208. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers. Fowler, “Social and Industrial Conditions in the Pocahontas Coal Fields,” 108.
17. Graeber, “In Regulation Nation,” 11–16. There are many other examples and abundant cases in which county officials promoted “reform” that actually gave more power to companies. Bailey, Matewan Before the Massacre, 90. Emmet, Labor Relations in the Fairmont, West Virginia, Bituminous Coal Field, 6, 74.
18. Managers probably would have agreed with Karl Marx that wages represented a sliver of the value workers created, which workers handed back to management for food in order to “reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence.” Marx, Capital, 717–18. “Persuasion by Starvation,” United Mine Workers Journal, June 12, 1902. Companies attempted to force miners to use only company stores: “When men are paid a little money they are watched, and if they are seen going into any other store than the one owned by the company for which they work, they as a rule are discharged.” A. B. Smoot, quoted in United Mine Workers Journal, June 4, 1896.
19. O’Toole, “Colliery Yards and Gardens.” The Board of Agriculture drew attention to the invisible value of household gardens in general, without specific mention of miners’ gardens: “If an accurate computation of the actual value of these kitchen gardens could be made the magnitude of the figures would astonish most of us.” Quoted in Atkeson, “Horticulture in West Virginia,” 352. The report of the American Constitutional Association is Life in a West Virginia Coal Field, 54. Company interest is well illustrated in their own publications: “The Garden Contest,” Our Own People, October 1918; “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37; Frederick W. Whiteside, “Beautifying a Coal Mining Camp,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 549; “Frick Coke Co.’s Welfare Work,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 470. In 1924, the West Virginia Coal Association estimated that 50 percent of the state’s miners planted vegetables and kept some livestock. Corbin estimates that vegetables accounted for between 10 and 20 percent of household income. See Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields, 33–34, 123. On money transfers between companies and banks, see Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 30–34.
20. “Gardens and Playgrounds in Mining Towns,” Coal Age 2 (1912): 336–37. Nettie McGill investigated mining communities in West Virginia in order to evaluate the quality of life for children. She reported that 70 percent of residents planted at least beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbages. McGill found that residents who managed to live outside coal camps felt more strongly about their autonomy and had larger and more robust gardens. McGill, Welfare of Children in Bituminous Coal Mining Communities in West Virginia, 53, 75.
21. Marx put the contradiction like this: “The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.” Marx, Capital, 718. The conversation between Ex-Secretary P. McBryde and Tom Farry is recorded in “West Virginia,” United Mine Workers Journal (June 4, 1896). Paul Saltrom notes of the subsistence economy, “By continuing alongside outside-controlled industrialization, the continuing networks of mutual aid served to reduce wage demands and thus to transfer Appalachia’s wealth (in the form of labor’s products) outside the region.” Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 127. Letters from Justus Collins to Glen Jean (July 20 and 22, 1905), Justus Collins Papers.
22. Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness, 89.
23. Brown, Constitutional Government Overthrown in West Virginia, 7. The “master and servant” decision is attributed to Judge Samuel C. Burdett, but I could not find it. I found mention of it in a hearing before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor held in 1921. West Virginia Coal Fields, Hearings, 94.
24. Of course, that is not the end of the story. At that point, the miners called in their own reinforcements—kin and other allies from other counties described in the press as “backwoods-men.” United Mine Workers Journal, July 11, 1912; “Terror Reigns in West Virginia,” United Mine Workers Journal, August 1, 1912. Congress concluded that any workingman constantly robbed of his wages by the company store, subject to rents he must pay in every season, whether working or not, and under the gun of hired security guards, “is virtually a chattel of the operator.” Quoted in “Coal Industry,” Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1897), 303. Lynch, “The West Virginia Coal Strike,” 630–37.
25. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 33–34. Kenny Lively interviewed by John Flynn, September 28, 1995, River Folklife Project collection (AFC 1999/008), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.068002.
26. Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Volume XI, Mines and Quarries, 256. Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910. Volume XI, Mines and Quarries, 171. Fifteenth Census of the United States, Mines and Quarries: 1929, 255. “[Twelfth Census of the United States].” Special Reports: Mines and Quarries: 1902, 701–702; Malcolm Ross, “Permanent Part-Time,” Survey Graphic 22 (1933), 268.
27. United States Department of the Interior, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, General Information Concerning the Purposes and Policies of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 4; Quaker Relief Efforts in Europe, 1914–1922 (a visual collection at Swarthmore College), www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/AFSC/lanternslides.htm.
28. Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life; Rice, “Footnote on Arthurdale,” 441; United States Department of the Interior, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, General Information Concerning the Purposes and Policies of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 4; Tate, “Possibilities and Limitations of Subsistence Homesteads,” 530.
29. Clark, “Will Back to the Land Help?,” 456. Clark held various positions in the experiment station at the University of Wisconsin. Wilson, “The Place of Subsistence Homesteads in Our National Economy,” 73–84; Committee for Economic Recovery, Arthurdale: A Partial Pattern for the New American Way of Life; United States Department of the Interior, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, General Information Concerning the Purposes and Policies of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 4.
30. Roosevelt, “Subsistence Farmsteads,” 199–201.
31. Arthurdale, along with the more than thirty other subsistence communities (in Minnesota, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, and California), lessened the suffering of approximately one thousand people. It says something that many residents considered the years they spent at Arthurdale the best and most privileged of their lives. For a positive view of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, see Garvey, “The Duluth Homesteads”; Lord and Johnstone, A Place on Earth, 49, 177–85; and Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 517.
32. Lord and Johnstone, A Place on Earth, 49, 177–85; Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 517. Congress held hearings on the problems of the homestead plan on January 24, 1934. The residents who complained, in this example, lived in Cumberland Homesteads in Tennessee. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads moved from the Department of the Interior to the Resettlement Administration and then to the Department of Agriculture.
33. Ware and Powell reported that the government sought people whose suffering “could be attri
buted to the depression,” as opposed to those who were destitute before, calling into question the homesteads as genuine economic relief. No African-Americans were admitted regardless of their qualifications or need. Looked at from these flaws, Arthurdale hardly presented a bold social experiment. Ware and Powell, “Planning for Permanent Poverty,” 513–24; Davis, “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” 141–42. Harold Ware lived between 1889 and 1935 and was the Communist Party’s top expert in agriculture. He died in an automobile accident. In 1952, Whittaker Chambers accused Ware of being a Soviet spy.
34. Drucker, “The Industrial Revolution Hits the Farmer.” Philip La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin, returned from a tour of Germany in 1933 and despaired of the families he had seen “digging their living out of the soil in the primitive fashion of our ancestors centuries ago.” “What have they left behind them?” he pleaded, “the taxes, the rent, the mortgages, stores, factories and farms … they are leaving behind them the economic system.” A representative of the American Engineering Council worried that society would collapse if people grew their own food for their own needs, writing, “Subsistence farming is not possible unless we are willing to destroy practically everything that we now call desirable in our present civilization … Farmers must be able to pay taxes and to purchase clothing and other necessary manufactured products which they are not now capable of producing.” The engineer and La Follette quoted in Clark, “Will Back to the Land Help?,” 456.
35. “Stirred Up by Henry Ford’s ‘Shotgun Gardens.’” I also used Kile, The New Agriculture, 151, and Zeuch, “The Subsistance Homestead Problem from the Viewpoint of an Economist,” 711. And see Business Week, September 2, 1931, 23. For articles by industrialists, see Harriman, “Factory and Farm in Double Harness,” and Crowther, A Basis for Stability, chap. 13.
36. Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865–1900,” 90.
37. Westmacott, African-American Gardens and Yards, 23–24; Reynolds, Black Farmers in America, 4.
38. Ochiltree, “Mastering the Sharecroppers,” 42. There were pure croppers who owned nothing but their labor and owed every possession to the landowner and tenants who paid rent in cotton and then offered the remaining cotton to furnishing merchants as a crop lien. Most sharecroppers were of the second kind. Taylor, An Introduction of the Study of Agricultural Economics, 350–54. Sharecropping appealed to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the British political economist of imperialism. “There are other ways in which there may be slavery in fact without the name. The freed negroes, and their descendants, of some of the states of North America … are virtually a sort of slaves [sic], by means of their extreme degradation in the midst of the whites.” Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, 175. “Report of President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy,” Handbook of Labor Statistics, 232–34; Taylor, An Introduction to the Study of Agricultural Economics, 252. The remaining 15 percent of African-Americans worked as laborers without access to land, and a few owned their own farms.
39. Graeber, Debt, 120–22. Vance, Human Geography of the South, 328–29.
40. Shaw and Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 488, 190–92, 281, 488. Tenants also exerted influence over their owners. One landlord called it the “copartnership mode of farming” and spoke against it. “It makes the laborer too independent; he becomes a partner, and has a right to be consulted.” Alston, “The Wages System—Grasses,” 317.
41. Shaw and Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 190–92, 281, 488.
42. Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science, 164–65, and The Capitalist World-Economy, 12; Dore, Myths of Modernity, 20. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1913, “Capitalism depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it.” Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 365.
43. On conservation and waste, see Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. For a critique of conservation and the way it limited access to commons, see Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature.
44. Shea, “Our Pappies Burned the Woods.” One informant, in a different source, described the process of “clearing it off for a crop”: “They’d send one of us old boys out and invite everybody in the whole community to come to the working.” The description suggests that a community did this work, not scattered individuals or households. Shackelford, Weinberg, and Anderson, Our Appalachia, 19–20. For a more empathetic assessment of swidden, see Scott, The Romance of Savage Life. I also consulted Campbell, Southern Highlander and His Homeland, 231–33; Hatch, “Delivering the Goods,” 7; Peck, Frank, and Eke, Economic Utilization of Marginal Lands in Nicholas and Webster Counties, West Virginia; and Peck, “Farm or Forest in the West Virginia Appalachians?” For the best argument and account of national parks as landscapes of dispossession, see Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, passim. On the subject of national parks and the coming of tourism, I consulted Gregg, Managing the Mountains.
45. Albright, The Birth of the National Park Service, 167; Gregg, Managing the Mountains, 105–35.
46. Albright and Willis, quoted in Gregg, Managing the Mountains, 105–35. The picture of Cliser is on p. 135 of Managing the Mountains. Sources spell Cliser’s first name more than one way. Some use the spelling Melanchthon.
47. Ross, Machine Age in the Hills, 40–42. Johnston, West Virginia, “The Switzerland of America”; Anderson, A Popular School History of the United States, 324. Vermont sometimes used the same slogan.
48. The USDA report, for which Gray wrote the introduction, is Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians. He also wrote an article summarizing key findings published as “Economic Conditions and Tendencies in the Southern Appalachians as Indicated by the Cooperative Survey,” in Mountain Life and Work. For statistics from the USDA report cited here, see 4–5, 55, and 143–49. The number of self-sufficing households was the same as it was in 1860, but population in the region was vastly greater.
49. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, 231–33; Hatch, “Delivering the Goods,” 7. Private and church schools make the school attendance rate higher. Illiteracy was as high as 7 percent in some Kentucky counties. Illiteracy figures describe children between the ages of ten and twenty. Gray, Economic and Social Problems, 99–101.
50. Gray, Economic and Social Problems, 9. A farmer was defined as a male at least fifteen years old.
51. Monroe Quillen, quoted in Shackelford, Weinberg, and Anderson, Our Appalachia, 238–39. Another study presents a different picture of the farm on the outskirts of the mining town. Nettie McGill’s The Welfare of Children in Bituminous Coal Mining Communities in West Virginia is based on fieldwork. Of the families she contacted near mining camps and towns, 70 percent kept gardens. They lived better than those who remained in more distant hollows. Almost all the families had fresh vegetables on the table in late summer. Beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage were common; beets, onions, lettuce, and carrots less so. Half the families had fruits like cantaloupes, raspberries, rhubarb, and apples. “The possibility of having more land to cultivate was frequently given as one of the great advantages of living outside the mining towns.” But McGill also argued in favor of the camps. Shanties often had electric lights rather than kerosene lamps. Some companies installed central water systems. One advantage of hollows: a lower danger of disease from unsanitary conditions. One advantage of camps: nearby doctors. McGill, Welfare of Children, 75.
52. For this and the previous paragraph: Gray, “Economic Conditions and Tendencies in the Southern Appalachians,” 4–5; Gray, Economic and Social Problems, 39.
53. Sherman and Henry, Hollow Folk, 5–10.
54. Nancy Parezo, quoted in Dilworth, “‘Handmade by an American Indian’ Souvenirs and the Cultural Economy of Southwestern Tourism,” 106. Jane S. Becker writes, “Fascination with traditional ways expressed middle-class Americans’ ambivalence toward industrialism, which might offer
material comforts but denied the human values they perceived in ‘simpler’ cultures.” Becker, Selling Tradition, 16. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 13–15, 84.
55. Williams, Appalachia, 313–20.
7. Negotiated Settlements
1. United Nations, World Urban Prospects, 8; Rochester, Why Farmers Are Poor, 68–69. Edward Shils defined modernity as consisting of very particular things: democratic institutions, welfare states, and government-supported industry. “‘Modern,’” Shils wrote in the 1950s, “means being western … It is the model of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus.” Shils, draft of “Political Development in the New States,” 1, quoted in Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 2–7. A quotation attributed to the French writer André Siegfried says it best: “The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the world.” André Siegfried quoted in Potter, People of Plenty, and Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 281. Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1–22, 1944, vol. 1, 166.
2. Zimmerman, “Discussion,” 84; Fels, “Planning for Purchasing Power,” 202.