In Smokestacks in the Hills, Lou Martin unpacks the underlying forces behind, responses to, and consequences of the industrialization of rural West Virginia. Martin simultaneously charts the creation of a rural-industrial working class and the persistence of a particular kind of rural culture wherein “locality shaped class identities” (p. 2). Martin brings rural-industrial workers and their approach to labor relations and politics into the conversation and historiography about job creation, job loss, and worker organizing that often focuses on Rust Belt urban workers and their unions. By focusing on the influences of place and rural culture in labor-management relations, Martin challenges assumptions about the meanings of changes wrought by industrialization and deindustrialization for workers and communities alike.
Hancock County, West Virginia, is the setting for Martin's analysis. Located only about forty miles west of Pittsburgh, it was in the late nineteenth century a world away from the economy and emerging class relations that dominated the Steel City. Hancock County's largely agricultural economy was rooted in a farming culture where households strove for subsistence rather than surplus and where choosing to “make do” with less—if that guaranteed a degree of economic independence and limited engagement with the broader agricultural marketplace—was the norm. It was precisely because of Hancock's geographic proximity to Pittsburgh but relative rural isolation and cultural distance that steel and pottery producers seeking more favorable business and labor conditions invested in and moved production there in the early twentieth century.
The processes and impacts of capital mobility have been charted thoroughly in the southward movement of textiles and the needle trades in the early twentieth century, but less so in Appalachia and in heavy industries like steel and pottery. As Martin shows, the men and women drawn into industrial employment in these steel and pottery factories maintained, and in some cases strengthened, their commitment to making do through the early decades of the twentieth century. Hancock's ruralness and residents’ access to land allowed industrial workers to supplement incomes by maintaining gardens, raising livestock, and hunting game in nearby woods—acts that bolstered the ethic and practice of local self-sufficiency and infused class identities there. At the same time, the power employers exerted over worker agency in the county's single-industry towns profoundly shaped broader labor-management relations in these communities. Through a combination of carrots (welfare capitalism programs) and sticks (strikebreaking and blacklisting), Martin asserts, company owners created a climate in which workers’ older, localized strategies for economic stability and advancement made all the more sense.
The Great Depression marked a key turning point in the relationship between Hancock County's rural-industrial workers, their employers, and the national industrial union movement emerging under the umbrella of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Importantly, Martin argues, as industrial workers in cities across the Northeast and Midwest turned to national organizations like the CIO in the 1930s to supplement or replace services previously provided by welfare capitalism programs and religious, ethnic, and other community organizations, Hancock County's industrial workers turned to localized forms of self-reliance, building upon long-standing social norms rooted in reciprocity and deep connections to land and community. Whereas factory workers in places like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit came to view class, politics, and labor-management relations through a lens of industrial unionism, their counterparts in Hancock County developed localized systems of grievance procedures, union organizing, and labor-management negotiations.
Through the 1970s, this local approach underpinned a delicate balance in Hancock County, especially in the steel plants. There, management maintained shop-floor rules and kept wages and benefits at levels close to those in factories operating under United Steel Workers of America (USWA)–negotiated contacts, while workers, acting through company-based unions, deftly wielded strike threats when in their interest. By the early 1980s, however, Hancock County's steel sector had begun a long decline, now facing pressures from international competition and global trade that had been impacting the county's pottery manufacturers since the late 1950s. In the face of job losses, factory closures, capital relocation, and a rapidly changing industrial landscape, the limits of localized class politics and workers’ strategies of “making do” came to the fore.
Martin's Smokestacks in the Hills historicizes and raises important questions about class solidarity, agency, and power, especially when rooted in localized institutions and cultural norms. The significance of the book is in Martin's primary focus on a sometimes unexplored layer of analysis—the importance of place—to scholarship grappling with class identity and its expression through class-based organizations. This emphasis complicates the historical narrative that paints workers who eschewed participation in national unions as docile, defeated, or driven by fears of job loss. In Hancock County, West Virginia, local culture was key in shaping norms of labor-management relations there that favored local control and set these rural-industrial workers on a path divergent from many of their urban counterparts. If, as Martin asserts, all class politics are ultimately local, how does this fact impact today's labor movements and strategies seeking to build broad solidarity, especially in national and international contexts? How does this localism of class identity impact decision making around the investment of mobile capital? These questions call for additional community-focused analyses along the lines of Martin's fine work, as well as comparative studies of various localities and industries, within and across regions. These will only further our understanding of the impacts of community and culture on class identities, social relations, capital mobility, and labor organizing.
