Uneven Ground (4 page)

By 1940 a pattern of growth without development had settled over Appalachia. The region had experienced rapid expansion in jobs and in the capacity to extract its natural resources, but growth had come without the development of an internal capacity to sustain prosperity. With the outbreak of war in Europe and preparation for war at home, the demand for mountain labor rose again, and once more Appalachia's resources became vital to the nation. The expansion of war industries stimulated demand for Appalachian coal and timber, and the new aircraft plants, steel mills, ordnance factories, and uniform manufacturers clamored for additional workers. As early as 1938, coal production began to recover as operators reorganized and consolidated companies in anticipation of wartime markets. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a frenzy of production swept the industry as once idle mines were reopened and company towns reawakened.

The effect of war mobilization was to revive hope for a generation of mountain young people, a generation that had known only poverty and hard times. In rural areas farm prices recovered, and workers
slowly returned to the mines and the mills, lessening the pressure on the land. Families and individuals migrated to defense jobs outside the mountains, and thousands of young men and women joined the armed forces. Sawmills that had not operated in years now hummed, turning out hardwood for building materials and military rifle stocks. New coal mines were opened and new sidetracks laid; abandoned tipples were repaired and painted and new mining equipment purchased. Company towns and county seats bustled with life, and a throng of mineral agents, timber buyers, and land developers invaded the region anew.

Much of the wartime boom was facilitated by government expenditures. Not only did federal contracts for ordnance and war materials stimulate production inside and outside the region, but government loans financed the expansion of critical industrial facilities. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and other federal agencies, for example, helped to finance wartime conversion of the chemical industry in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia and to underwrite the purchase of new mining machinery and loading equipment across the coalfields. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provided cheap electricity for the production of aluminum in east Tennessee and for making tents, uniforms, and blankets in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. Throughout Appalachia the new public buildings and improved roads constructed by thousands of Works Progress Administration workers during the Depression provided critical infrastructure for the war effort.

The mountain population, moreover, responded to the call for national defense with enthusiasm. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the attraction of military service and war industries jobs had begun to empty mountain public relief rolls of young men and mountain schools of some of their brightest students. Appalachian people had always been quick to serve their country in times of war, and enlistment rates in the region were among the highest in the nation during World War II. The war also provided an opportunity for escape from poverty and idleness. The promise of steady employment, higher wages, and better living conditions drew thousands into the armed services and into the defense plants of Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton, Baltimore, and Norfolk. Companies from as far away as Michigan and
Massachusetts recruited employees, including teenage boys and girls, from mountain hollows and transported them to mills and assembly lines in urban centers. When asked how he liked the army, one mountain youth responded, “Anything is better than what I had at home.” A year into the war, a mountain teacher reported, “The young manhood of our town has moved out almost en masse. . . . Never again can this section be the same.”
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Those who remained in the region suddenly found employment opportunities where none had existed a short time before. The revived coal mines, sawmills, and chemical plants quickly experienced a labor shortage and were forced to depend on older workers when the young men of the area were drafted or volunteered for service. Men in their forties and fifties who had entered the mines during the heyday of the first boom found themselves heading once again belowground or into some other kind of public work.

War mobilization helped to redistribute population within the region and to launch an out-migration from Appalachia that would stream millions of mountaineers into the nation's urban centers over the next three decades. The movement of young people into the military and war industries and the return of families to the coal camps drained population from rural communities, renewing the process of decline that had begun at the turn of the century. Some rural agricultural areas experienced major difficulty in securing enough labor to sustain farm production, and many farmsteads were abandoned or only marginally maintained during the war.
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As families migrated to jobs in neighboring industrial counties or to nearby urban communities such as Lexington, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee, the population of rural farm communities declined proportionately.

A study of wartime migration in eastern Kentucky estimated that more than eighty-five thousand persons, almost 19 percent of the population, left the area between 1940 and 1942 alone. The decrease in population exceeded the gain for the entire previous decade and took 40 percent of the men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. Most of the decline was accounted for by the loss of farm people, with about half of the loss attributed to entering the armed services and the remainder to leaving for industrial work in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes. The study determined that the out-migration had been largely
one of young families and of individuals, especially young men. “Many heads of families,” it concluded, “have left their wives and children to carry on the farm operations.”
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While rural farm areas lost population, wartime recovery spurred unexpected growth in mountain county seats. These middle-class communities had stagnated during the Depression, but now local merchants, bankers, lawyers, and agents for outside companies flourished with the revival of activity in the outlying coal districts. Newly paved highways made possible by state and federal expenditures during the 1930s linked the county seats with each other and with the rapidly growing urban communities on the fringes of the mountains, and improved gravel roads constructed by the WPA stretched up the narrow valleys to the coal camps.
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Automobiles, whose numbers had expanded even during the Depression, now shuttled goods and people back and forth from these commercial centers, reducing the isolation of the once rail-dependent coal towns.

The improved highways also gave rise to a new form of mining enterprise, the truck mine, which would become ubiquitous in the southern Appalachian coalfields after the war. Rising wartime markets for coal enticed many local residents to open small mines on family-owned land or to lease seams of coal on the secondary spurs that jutted from the main ridges. The larger mining companies deemed the coal in these secondary spurs, being thinner and more remote from the tipples and railroads, to be unrecoverable, but with better roads and a booming market, these seams provided an opportunity for indigenous entrepreneurs. With as little as a one-thousand-dollar investment, a man could open a seam of coal at the outcrop, construct a wooden bin down the hillside with which to load the coal into trucks, and transport it to regional markets or rail-side tipples. These small operations, which generally employed only five or six men, could produce eighty to a hundred tons of coal a day and realize profits of close to a dollar on the ton for their owners.
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The federal Office of War Mobilization encouraged the production of more coal as a patriotic duty, and thousands of small operators took advantage of the artificial demand to open new mines. During the war the growth of such mines was phenomenal throughout the coalfields, but nowhere was it as prevalent as in eastern Kentucky, where
more than 4,200 truck mines opened in the 1940s, accounting for almost 38 percent of the state's production.
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Most of these mines were nonunion and nonmechanized, utilizing human labor to cut and load the coal and ponies to haul it to the loading bins. Most paid wages significantly below the union scale, but even seven or eight dollars a day was welcomed by aging coal miners who had not worked steadily in years.

The war brought to the mountains a rush of activity that had not been seen since the early years of the century. Opportunities for jobs, business expansions, and the movement of young people into the war effort created a temporary respite from the hard times of the Depression, but this growth masked fundamental flaws in the region's development. Most of Appalachia's mineral and timber resources continued to be owned by outside corporations and controlled by nonresident interests. The value added from their extraction remained largely untaxed for local benefit. Moreover, a single-industry economy frustrated the diversification of local enterprises and tied most mountain communities to the vagaries of national and, increasingly, international markets. Local political leaders, many of whom benefited from their relationships to outside interests, continued to defend the status quo. The gap between traditional agricultural communities and rapidly modernizing urban centers beyond the region grew.

Although rising coal markets and expanding employment generated new sources of income, rationing and other austerity measures during the war prevented many consumer goods from reaching mountain residents. In the coal camps, company houses were simply patched and painted for the returning miners, and hospitals, schools, and other public facilities in the villages were left in disrepair. Even the spate of new truck mines placed additional burdens on public coffers to maintain the coal haul roads and contributed to the overexpansion of the industry itself. Overexpansion had plagued Appalachian coal mines in the 1920s, and following World War II it again led to instability and intense competition between the small mines and the larger producers. Since most of the truck mines were nonunion, miners in these smaller operations received lower wages and no benefits for their labor and were highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the coal market. Indeed, wartime demand and competition between the larger corporate mines and
the new truck mines would increase the mechanization of the coal mining process, setting the stage for the eventual displacement of thousands of miners and their families.

The mechanization of the American coal industry was an evolutionary process, beginning as early as the 1890s, but new technology was slow to come to southern mines. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Appalachian coal mines depended primarily on the labor of men and boys to undercut and load their product for market. This was in part because of the lack of unionization and the availability of cheap labor, but it was also in part because of the expense and slow development of coal-loading technology. The introduction, for example, of mechanized undercutting equipment in larger mines early in the century actually increased the demand for workers to load coal and operate mechanical haulage systems. Undercutting machinery could produce many times more coal in an hour than the individual pick miner could blast “from the solid” in a day, but the technology required additional laborers to manage the equipment, to load the additional coal into gondolas, and to transport it to the surface. It was not until the introduction of mobile mechanical loaders on the eve of World War II that mechanization began to have a major impact on employment in the region, and only then as a by-product of union decisions and competition for postwar markets.

The end of the hand-loading era in Appalachia began during World War II, when a few larger mines introduced conveyor belts and new automatic loading machines into their pits to meet wartime contracts, but it was not until after the war that significant numbers of Appalachian mines began to utilize the new technology. Many of the region's mining operations had been unionized under the New Deal, and although owners were able to resist pressures from John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to drive up wages and benefits during the war, most operators anticipated rising labor costs with the return of peace. When the UMWA established its Health and Retirement Funds in 1946 and launched a series of annual strikes that increased levies on coal production to finance the funds, larger union mines turned increasingly to mechanization to reduce labor costs and to compete with the burgeoning nonunion truck mines. By 1950, 69
percent of the nation's coal was loaded by mechanical means, in comparison with 13 percent fifteen years earlier.
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The new mechanical loading equipment reduced the need for hand loading of coal just when large numbers of young men and women were returning home from the war with high expectations. This generation of mountain youth had grown up during the Depression and had been scattered across the globe by the war. They had experienced better housing, improved health care, and steady wages, and they had observed the comparative wealth of other parts of the country. Now they hoped for a brighter future for themselves and their children. Some expected to return to the mines. Others hoped for jobs as secretaries, welders, mechanics, and barbers, and still others planned to apply their GI benefits to acquire an education. Many returning veterans found the changes that had come to their communities overwhelming. “When I left here in 1941,” observed one veteran, “everybody was stone broke and had just about run out of ambition to do anything except draw relief rations, piddle around on the WPA and loaf. But when I got back home the mines were goin' full blast and a lot of men who didn't even have a job in 1941 was runnin' two or three truck mines and had seventy five or a hundred thousand dollars in cash.”
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At first it appeared that the veterans' hopes for a brighter future at home might be fulfilled, at least in some mountain communities. Although rural, agricultural areas continued to suffer economic decline, expectations remained high in the coal camps and other industrial centers. For a time, at least, the transition to peacetime production and the expansion of postwar markets sustained the coal boom. When Congress disbanded the wartime Office of Price Administration in 1946, coal prices soared, and a new flurry of mine openings swept the coalfields, fueling speculation that the good times would continue and temporarily disguising the inevitable consequences of mine mechanization.