Mark Aldrich’s new book endeavors to make sense of a momentous historical development: the eclipse of coal’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dominance over U.S. energy markets. Aldrich, an emeritus professor of economics at Smith College, has made major contributions in numerous books and articles to our understanding of the history of workplace safety in the United States. The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800–1940 constitutes Aldrich’s latest effort to ask probing questions about the entanglements between capitalism, technology, and governance in the American past. The result is a book that is useful and ambitious, but also unnecessarily limited by the author’s tendency to invoke a priori assumptions drawn from economic theory rather than empirical evidence about energy markets that were always complex and often dysfunctional.
Aldrich organizes his study into four parts. The first, comprising two chapters, glosses coal’s rise. Here Aldrich retraces well-trodden ground, focusing almost entirely on entrepreneurs as well as so-called tinkers—innovators whose lack of formal education did not stop them from making crucial improvements in the extraction, transportation, and consumption, first of anthracite and then of bituminous. The second and third parts of The Rise and Fall of King Coal, “Losing Industry” and “Leaving Home,” form the book’s heart. Here, Aldrich reconstructs coal’s gradual displacement from manufacturing, railroad, and domestic markets. This fall from dominance, Aldrich shows, intensified after World War I, leading the extraction of coal to decline throughout the twenties and thirties. Natural gas and kerosene elbowed anthracite, bituminous, wood, and other cooking fuels out of urban and rural kitchens alike, with improved stove designs and astute marketing pitches that promised to lighten women’s domestic duties, doing much to drive these changes. Aldrich makes especially astute use of advertisements and articles from trade publications and women’s magazines as well as household surveys. Together, these sources highlight the complexities of women’s encounters with these technologies and the fuels they burned. Aldrich argues that as “farm women’s time was … becoming more valuable … oil stoves that lightened the load of cooking had an increasing economic payoff” (170). Ultimately, the author claims, “the spread of kerosene cooking was not simply a reflection of American resource abundance.” Instead, “its exploitation reflected the efforts of men of science, marketers and hucksters, stove manufacturers, farm and women’s magazines, and Standard Oil” (176). Furnaces, like stoves, became a “battleground” where natural gas and fuel oil made less dramatic but nonetheless significant inroads (177). The shift away from coal in basement furnaces and boilers, like the fuel’s loss of market share in American kitchens, resulted from a concatenation of innovation, coal’s demerits (including labor strikes and indoor air pollution), price signals (the installed cost of oil burners dropped by more than half between 1929 and 1934 while anthracite prices “nearly doubled” between 1915 and 1930), and vigorous efforts by producers, dealers, and utilities to extol the virtues of oil and gas (202).
The lone chapter in the book’s fourth and final part, “Counterattack,” examines two key planks in the coal industry’s broader efforts to restore demand: strip mining, which succeeded at increasing labor productivity and saving workers’ lives, and research and development efforts spearheaded by mine operators’ government and university partners, especially liquefaction, which devolved into what Aldrich aptly characterizes as “an enormously expensive dry hole” (230). Widespread successes at fuel conservation between the 1910s and 1940s, Aldrich ultimately demonstrates, played a central role in the coal industry’s decline. With railroads, manufacturers, households, and other consumers all managing to squeeze more and more usable energy from a given unit of anthracite or bituminous, the nation’s once-booming coalfields began to languish. After a short-lived resurgence during World War II, coal output fell again. Then as now, electrical generation remained King Coal’s single domain of enduring economic significance.
Energy historians, environmental historians, economic historians, and early twentieth-century historians will all benefit from engaging The Rise and Fall of King Coal. The laborious and eye-opening statistical compilations Aldrich provides in the text as well as in appendices are especially helpful. The author is at his best when he hews closely to his historical evidence. The book is less persuasive, however, in its overarching interpretations. Aldrich maintains that “the keys” to the energy transitions he tracks “were entrepreneurs responding to market signals and supported by an increasingly complex technical network that included not only the tinkers but scientists and engineers as well” (232). This conclusion not only ignores workers’ contributions but also overlooks widespread evidence of corruption, collusion, fraud, and other misdeeds that proved all too common among U.S. coal operators. Aldrich’s claims too often seem philosophical or even ideological in nature. “Precisely because markets reward conservation,” Aldrich writes in one revealing passage, “they have routinely discovered new ways to save energy” (233). In lending both unity and agency to an economic abstraction, Aldrich betrays a curiously facile understanding of coal markets that were routinely portrayed by mine workers, political reformers, government officials, and even mine operators as deeply troubled.
On the basis of this unproven presumption, Aldrich proceeds to argue that “American policy makers” have struggled in recent decades to persuade the public of “the need to transition” away from fossil fuels “to protect the global climate, but they are just as skeptical of energy markets as were their progressive ancestors. Yet historical evidence,” he declares, “suggests that skepticism is unwarranted, for until World War II, America’s energy history abounds with examples of market-directed innovations that drove energy transitions” (234). Aldrich may have a point, but I would have found this book more compelling if he had devoted more time and space to analyzing how actual markets for fossil fuel functioned in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century—and, more to the point, if he had done more to consider how externalities, social costs, and market failure contributed to King Coal’s rise and fall.
