Uneven Ground (5 page)

By 1948, however, the postwar boom had run its course, and the demand for coal began to level off. The construction of new pipelines and refineries during the war increased the availability of oil and natural gas, and many of coal's traditional consumers began to convert to these alternative energy sources. Not only were these fuels cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient, but industrialists concerned with consistent
production had found them to be more reliable as well. A series of UMWA strikes following the war demonstrated Lewis's ability to shut down national coal supplies and further confirmed coal's reputation as a risky fuel because of the uncertainty of supplies. As homes, industries, railroads, and other consumers switched to oil, coal's dominance over American energy markets weakened.
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The first mines to feel the return of hard times were the truck mines, which generally sold their product on the “spot” market and were not protected by long-term contracts. As the price of coal plummeted at the railhead, hundreds of “dog hole” mines that had sprung up overnight closed almost as quickly as they had appeared. Thousands of miners were laid off, and the gilded prosperity of the coal camps and commercial towns faded again. Some small-time operators who had amassed minor fortunes during the boom years lost everything. Others took what remained of their wealth and moved away. All those whose incomes were tied to the volatile truck mine sector—truck drivers, mechanics, merchants—saw their livelihoods dwindle. Everywhere a decided gloom settled over the coalfields.

Then, in 1950, the UMWA and the nation's larger coal producers signed a labor contract that had monumental consequences in Appalachia. On the surface, the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of March 5, 1950, appeared to be a major victory for union miners. The contract raised wages and benefits across the industry and restored royalties to the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds while assuring stable production for companies by eliminating the “willing and able” (right to strike) clause of earlier agreements. Unionized coal companies had stopped paying into the Health and Retirement Funds in 1949 in response to declining coal prices and rising competition from nonunion, primarily southern Appalachian, mines. In retaliation, Lewis called a brief strike and later ordered a production slowdown until a new contract could be negotiated. The slowdown precipitated a national crisis in coal reserves, and the UMWA leader, fearing a federal takeover of the mines, agreed to a settlement proposed by George H. Love, head of the Northern Coal Operators' Association. Despite opposition from the Southern Bituminous Coal Operators' Association, which represented most of the smaller producers
in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia, the contract was ratified and subsequently imposed across the industry.
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The 1950 wage agreement was the culmination of two decades of struggle by Lewis to increase wages and benefits for the nation's coal miners, and it reflected a vision for the industry that he had advocated since the 1920s. Believing that coal's persistent problems resulted from overexpansion within the industry, Lewis had long favored mechanization as a way to reduce the number of coal mines, stabilize production, and improve the health and welfare of working miners. He believed that a high wage scale would force operators to lower labor costs by introducing modern, labor-saving machinery, which would in turn increase production efficiency and lower coal prices to consumers. Smaller, inefficient (and nonunion) mines, which he saw as the source of overproduction, would be forced out of business, thus eliminating the problem of too many mines and too many miners. In Lewis's judgment, a high uniform wage rate and mechanization of the workplace would secure the health of the industry, and the two concepts would complement each other.
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Lewis recognized that the agreement would result in the displacement of thousands of coal miners, but he believed that high wages for actively employed miners and good benefits for retired workers were the long-term priorities for the union. By tying the growth of the union Health and Retirement Funds to increases in production and by agreeing to a no-strike clause to sustain those increases, Lewis provided incentives for larger mining companies to mechanize and for union miners to acquiesce in the practice. Unfortunately, the Lewis strategy worked to the disadvantage of southern producers, whose smaller operations and distance from markets made them more susceptible to rising labor costs. Soon after signing the 1950 agreement, the northern coal operators and the owners of larger captive mines formed the Bituminous Coal Operators' Association, which, along with the UMWA, set the standards for wages and benefits in the industry for the next three decades. Between 1950 and 1972, the nation experienced only three nationwide strikes by union miners, but this labor quiescence resulted in thousands of small and medium-size mines in Appalachia being sold or closed and an entire generation of miners being replaced by machines.

The impact of the 1950 wage agreement was especially dramatic in Appalachia. Between 1950 and 1970, the region's deep mines mechanized rapidly to increase productivity and reduce labor costs. The introduction of mobile Joy loaders and continuous miners permanently reduced the need for hand shoveling in the larger mines and increased pressure on smaller operations to mechanize. Introduced in 1948, the continuous miner revolutionized coal production. By integrating the work of undercutting, drilling, blasting, and loading into one process, the continuous miner made it possible for ten men to produce three times the tonnage mined by eighty-six miners loading coal by hand.
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As the percentage of coal produced by machines increased, the number of actively employed miners declined proportionately. By 1960 fewer than half of the 475,000 miners in the region at the end of World War II still found work in the deep mines, and by 1970 that number had declined to 107,000.
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As hard times settled again over the coalfields, thousands of miners joined their rural neighbors in a massive exodus from the hills. Over the next two decades, the stream of young people that had poured from the mountains during World War II became a flood of displaced families. In one of the nation's largest internal migrations, over 3 million people left Appalachia between 1940 and 1970, seeking economic refuge in the cities of the Midwest.
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Laboring beside other displaced populations—African Americans from the Deep South, Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Latinos from the Southwest, and second-generation immigrant families from southern and eastern Europe—Appalachians built the automobiles, washing machines, radios, and televisions that shaped the postwar consumer society of the United States. Mountain migrants brought their music and culture with them to the new world of the city, creating little Appalachian communities in the midst of urban centers and helping to bring national attention to the plight of communities back home.

Migration was not new to Appalachia. Mountain people had migrated for decades to find work, both within the region and outside it. After the Civil War, Appalachian families had moved to the West, especially to Texas and Missouri, in search of cheap land, and at the turn of the twentieth century, many more had filled the cotton textile
mills of the southern Piedmont. Mountain farmers were accustomed to leaving home for seasonal jobs, transporting livestock to market, rafting logs to low-country sawmills, or finding occasional work in the coal mines. Indeed, during the heyday of the coal boom, mining families commonly moved from one mining camp to another in search of better wages, better schools, and better housing. Never before, however, had Appalachians migrated out of the region in such large numbers. When conditions at home forced them to seek opportunities in the North, they relied on old patterns of relocation and traditional support systems to ease their adjustment to urban life and to remain emotionally rooted in the hills.

Family and community were at the center of the migration experience. Family linkages provided the means for communication about jobs in cities as well as the support networks for relocation. “When mountain people migrate from the region,” observed sociologists James Brown and Harry Schwarzweller, “they do not go because they have learned of attractive job opportunities through the efforts of the United States Employment Services or some private recruiting agency; they go because some relative ‘out there' has written and told them, or has come back on a visit and told them that jobs are available.”
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Migration routes and urban destinations had been established during the war, and earlier migrants invited relatives to live with them until they could get jobs. Typically, breadwinners moved to the city for a short time to look for work before returning home to the mountains for their spouses and children. Other relatives followed later.

Often people from one community or hollow migrated to the same town in the North, providing an extended network of family and friends to ease the adjustment to urban life and to preserve cultural traditions. Northern employers utilized the kinship networks to recruit additional workers, establishing a steady pipeline of labor between particular mountain communities and specific northern cities. The Champion Paper Company in Hamilton, Ohio, for example, recruited heavily from eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina along U.S. 23, and the Cincinnati-Dayton area became a favorite destination for mountain migrants from these areas. By the end of the 1960s, one in three industrial workers in Ohio was from Appalachia.
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Employees from one section of eastern Kentucky so dominated the labor
force in one Ohio factory that a sign on the doorway between departments reportedly read “Leave Morgan County (KY) and enter Wolfe County.”
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Migrants from Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina tended to settle in Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, and Chicago, while migrants from West Virginia and Virginia moved to Akron, Canton, Columbus, Cleveland, and Baltimore. So many migrants poured into Akron, Ohio, that the Rubber City became known as the “capital of West Virginia,” and for years the migrants held an annual West Virginia Day celebration that attracted more than thirty thousand former Mountain State residents.
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Southern Appalachian migrants to Chicago tended to settle in the Uptown district; those in Cincinnati clustered in Little Price Hill. In Detroit, mountain migrants concentrated in an area known as Little Appalachia, where they established their own restaurants, stores, churches, and bars. Migrants to Baltimore settled primarily in Remington and Sparrows Point, near the booming Bethlehem Steel Mill.

As a result of these patterns of relocation, linkages between the mountains and urban migrants remained strong, and frequent weekend visits provided a web of support for both migrants and their families. It was not uncommon on Friday nights in the 1950s to find the highways flowing south from Akron, Dayton, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago filled with Appalachian migrants heading to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Migrants quipped that the only things taught in mountain schools after World War II were the three Rs—reading, writing, and Route 23, or whatever the local highway to the North was. Steady work and higher wages in the cities soon enabled many young families to acquire new furniture, clothing, and better cars, which they proudly displayed for relatives during their weekend trips home. This in turn encouraged others to get on the “hillbilly highway” to the cities.

A variety of factors motivated individuals to leave Appalachia. Most of the migrants were young, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and while the emigration of single individuals continued, the pressure of rising unemployment after 1950 increased the number of families and children in the migration pool. Young couples were especially drawn to the opportunities for better education, better housing, and better health care for their children, but they also hoped to
find financial security for themselves. Although the majority of migrants lacked high school diplomas, they were often among the more educated and ambitious youth in their communities. Despite having strong emotional ties to family and place, they saw little opportunity for themselves or their children in the depressed mountain economy. Like their parents before them, who had left the farm for the mines and mills of the first industrial boom, many post–World War II migrants expected to return to the mountains after a short period of work in the cities. Even after a decade or more of successful life in the North, southern Appalachian migrants still referred to Appalachia as home.

Often men were the first family members to leave for the city and the first to want to return home. Mountain men had always enjoyed relative freedom in the workplace, whether in the mines, in the woods, or on the farm, so the more disciplined and regimented environment of the factories and the strange, congested, and fast-paced lifestyle of the cities sometimes caused stress, frustration, and other difficulties with adjustment. Some men compensated for their situation by continuing to participate in traditional mountain male activities such as hunting, fishing, drinking, and gathering to tell stories and jokes, whereas others simply abandoned the city and returned home.

Women, on the other hand, often derived greater rewards from migration and were more reluctant to return to the hard life of the mountains. Unlike Gertie Nevels, the heroine of
The Dollmaker
who longed to return to nature and the land, many mountain women found their lives much easier as a result of the modern household appliances available in the city and the relative proximity of stores, schools, and neighbors. Not only did their children have greater opportunities for education and health care, they themselves had chances for employment unavailable in the mountains. For the first time in their lives, some mountain women found a degree of economic independence and security that was unknown in Appalachia.