Gordon Simmons introduced WVU Professor Ken Fones-Wolf on Sunday during the recent WV Book Festival to talk about his new book, “Glass Towns -Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s. ” His program was truly fascinating to anyone interested in a thriving industry that long ago was moved abroad. Simmons interviewed Fones-Wolf last summer for his weekly cable show, “WV Author”. As the professor said, “globalism brought the glass industry to West Virginia, and also moved it out of West Virginia.”
I asked him about the recent much-discussed book, “Unleashing Capitalism,” by another WVU prof, Sobel. He has written a response to it that will be published in a coming book, saying, “Sobel is just historically not accurate.” Congrats to Prof. Fones-Wolf for writing a book that should be required reading for all of WV’s leaders .Here are some other pictures I took at the festival -
Here is Penny Loeb and Arly Johnson. Penny wrote “Moving Mountains.” Mr. Johnson was a WV state legislator who survived the Buffalo Creek Disaster. Loeb worked with Bob Gates on his second film on mountaintop removal mining after she wrote the first national story for US News on the devastation MTR causes.
WV author Gretchen Laskas was interviewed by Gordon Simmons on Monday, Oct. 15th for his cable show, “WV Authors.” She stopped in to visit WVLC Adult Services librarian Susan Hayden who has set up book discussions around the state using Laskas new book, “The Miner’s Daughter.”
Posted with permission of the author -
Mythbusting and MythmakingBy Prof. Ken Fones-Wolf Claudia Williamson’s contribution to Russell Sobel’s Unleashing Capitalism purports to take us on an historical journey to understand the roots of the “anti-capitalist mentality” that pervades West Virginia. For her, the source is clear: it is in the “myths” created by labor historians who have chronicled the state’s “historical experiences with industry, specifically in coal mining” (57). To correct the record, she turns to “the work of noted economic historian, Price V. Fishback” and his book, Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930. While Fishback’s work is well worth pondering, normal academic inquiry typically demands that more than one source be considered. To be fair, she does give a passing nod to David Corbin and William Graebner, but only on those points where they bolster Williamson’s political perspective. Hence, she cites Graebner’s statement that the impact of safety legislation was largely disappointing and Corbin’s evidence that labor turnover was high, but not the reasons behind these phenomena. If this chapter is offered as a scholarly rebuttal to anti-capitalist mythmaking, it would meet only the most meager academic standards.
Is there anything to learn from this mythbusting? Yes. Fishback’s work should make us re-examine the dreary picture of coal mining. As he asserts, the data suggest that miners were not virtual slaves to the company store and the isolated coal hollow. Company stores generally charged competitive rates and were not completely free to gouge the miners. Deborah Weiner’s fascinating work on Jewish merchants in the coalfields in some respects actually reinforces Fishback’s work. However, she also notes that these middlemen had to tiptoe around the power of the coal companies in order to maintain their businesses. In addition, turnover rates refute the idea that miners had no effective voice against harsh conditions; they could and did vote with their feet. Still, one must be careful; a closer reading of Corbin would show that many West Virginia miners were part-timers who took “public work” (mining jobs) when there was less to do on the farm. This is one of the reasons that the UMW had such a difficult time organizing them. But this sort of turnover did not necessarily create a competitive labor market that raised wages and improved working conditions as Fishback and Williamson claim.
The point about voting with one’s feet is important, but massive turnover rates in non-union mines (50 to 60 percent higher than union ones) hardly serve as a ringing endorsement of the conditions that miners found in an unfettered capitalist market. Interestingly, Fishback talks as if there was just one national labor market in coal and that firms had to “compete with one another for the services of miners.” Williamson blithely adds: “Under capitalism, workers and firms must bargain voluntarily” (60). Hardly! To create the sort of competitive labor market that Fishback imagines, miners would have needed adequate information about, and access to, alternatives as well as the ability to move to a new job without a significant cost. But as Ronald L. Lewis pointed out in his prize winning Black Coal Miners in America, there were different labor markets for blacks, immigrants and native-born whites. There were also different labor markets for union and non-union sectors of the industry, which was one of the reasons why
West Virginia’s coal history was so violent. Williamson’s notion that the market forces workers and firms bargain voluntarily (and by implication with equal power) is absurd.
Where they did bargain with some measure of equality was in the unionized coalfields. There, turnover and accident rates (to which we will return) were lower and wages higher. Williamson, of course, reads this another way. She argues that unions typically traded higher wages for an overall decline in the number of jobs: “The benefits they [unions] created for certain miners were paid for by unemployment of others” (60). This is true. UMW President John L. Lewis wrote as early as 1925 that the efficient mechanization of mining should result in good pay and benefits for those still doing the dangerous but necessary work of coal mining. Yet Williamson sees this as a betrayal of miners. This is a very interesting argument for a free-market capitalist to make. Isn’t this what capitalism is supposed to do? I thought a high-wage, high-productivity economy would free up less productive labor for other purposes. Williamson is so intent on bashing unions that she even finds their efforts to improve capitalist productivity to be sinister.
As to safety, she asserts, quite correctly, that government had little impact. But she ignores why this was the case. Jeffrey Cook’s dissertation on Governor A. B. Fleming might have given her some clues. Cook points out that in the wake of the terrible Monongah disaster (361 dead), Fleming so carefully managed the writing of mine safety legislation as to make it ineffective. Instead, Williamson blames the miners. Because they were paid by the ton, miners took chances that led to the small-scale accidents in which the majority of deaths and injuries occurred, she concludes, and these were just the sort of accidents that mine safety legislation could not prevent. Williamson ignores the fact that union mines (offering more protection for miners than either the market or weak laws) did much better than non-union ones (also a mark of efficiency), or that other countries operated mines with a fraction of the deaths found in the U.S. Safer practices and fewer deaths were achieved elsewhere. Just how important were those extra profits?
Finally, just what sort of capitalism is it that West Virginians despise? Williamson would have us believe that it was only the myths of poor wages and working conditions that the coal industry inflicted upon miners that shaped our ideas. Obviously, people are (and should be) concerned with how an industry treats its employees. But there are other historical reasons that mountaineers harbor suspicions about capitalism. For most, they have seen the ways that corporations have gobbled up profits and the state’s resources and have given back so little. The capitalist Henry Gassaway Davis said as much when defending a proposed coal severance tax in 1904! “It is unnecessary for me to call your attention to the comparatively large expenditure by the State for the protection of our coal, oil and gas operations, for which the State now gets but little return,” he wrote to William Hubbard; “they should bear their just proportion of the taxes.” Just imagine what a pool of resources would have been available to modernize the state had the legislature taken his advice.
Instead, beginning with the railroads and proceeding through the timber, coal, oil and natural gas industries, corporations have routinely found ways to avoid paying for the wealth-producing resources that they have shipped off to other regions. The corporations skirted tax assessments, avoided tax reforms, manipulated the laws governing land, starved investment in other industries that might have competed for labor, and wrought havoc with the environment. Read Ronald L. Lewis’s history of deforestation, or Richard Simon’s dissertation on the coal industry and underdevelopment, or my book on the glass industry for the sordid details. The people of West Virginia do not object to capitalism per se; they object to the unfettered sway of large corporations that have no interest in building a balanced and self-sustaining economy that promises high wages and high productivity in the market so that all of the state’s people might benefit. If we listen to people like Claudia Williamson, we will continue to get the sort of capitalism that has put West Virginia at the bottom of the nation. Ken Fones-Wolf,Professor of History
West Virginia
University
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