The life and death of the underground coal miner, on the one hand, and the high politics of the United States, on the other, have rarely been conceptualized together. Trish Kahle’s new monograph demonstrates why these two seemingly juxtaposed vantages on American history should be understood as mutually integral. The emergence of the United States as a world power and an energy-intensive society was founded upon mining, moving and burning coal, from nineteenth-century railways and steamships to twentieth- and twenty-first century electrical power generation. The miners themselves, who are this volume’s chief protagonists, were in turn formative to moulding the politics of the republic, from battles with draconian corrupt sheriffs in company towns through to the development of the New Deal and aspirations for renewed energy independence during the fraught conditions of the 1970s. Conversely, the hopes attached to American citizenship and the promise of democracy were foundational to how miners conceived of their struggles for safety, dignity and a standard of living commensurate to their efforts in fuelling an increasingly affluent society.
Kahle’s book centres on the central Appalachian region which formed the core of American coal country and remains closely associated with the industry’s heritage in the contemporary United States. Her analysis begins with the formation of what she terms American ‘coal-fired democracy’ in the late nineteenth century. It was founded upon a contradiction: the extension of convenience, comfort and liberal democratic rights in the northern cities of the United States were dependent on the denial of the same conditions in the coalfields. A distinctive autocratic industrial and political order was marked by the denial of basic rights, impoverishment and the empowerment of coal operators in the mining areas. More than a thousand miners typically died annually in industrial accidents between 1880 and 1922, while hundreds more perished in decades of gun battles that raged between the operators and their armed confederates, on the one hand, and unionized miners, on the other. Only the construction of the New Deal order following the Great Depression brought this pattern of violence to an end, cementing collective bargaining in the Appalachian mining heartlands. Yet these defining advances remained marked by the tectonic of an ‘economic mediation’ (p. 64) between the mortal dangers miners faced underground and the costs of production faced by operators, along with the price consumers paid for coal and electricity.
Energy citizenship, the book’s defining concept, was founded on this Faustian bargain between miners, their employers and federal government. Miners improved their standing in American society by demonstrating their utility and necessity to its functioning and advancement. Yet this always came at a stark cost in human lives, either through horrendous accidents with tens of fatalities, more frequent routinized fatal accidents and injuries or the slow awful deaths brought by the killer occupational disease of pneumoconiosis, termed ‘black lung’ by American miners.
Most of the book assesses the development of energy citizenship between the 1940s and the 1980s. Pivotally, Kahle demonstrates the retained centrality of coal and coal miners to American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Coal production literally kept the lights on in an increasingly prosperous and suburbanizing United States. The mod cons of the age of household gadgets and home-centred leisure – from refrigerators to television – were ultimately powered by coal. Yet these changes left the miners doubly isolated. On the one hand, coal itself was marginalized – encountered primarily as electricity, a unitary service that came supplied in the same form to suburbia whether it was produced by coal, oil or nuclear fuels. Conversely, the coalfields themselves were devastated by huge redundancies as demand for coal diminished and the dwindling workforce risked life, limb and lungs in the dangerous conditions of increasingly automated mines. Only the onset of a national and international energy crisis from the late 1960s changed this, holding out the opportunity for miners to assert their claims to energy citizenship once more.
Kahle’s extensive work in the archives of trade unions, campaigning organizations and government shines through in bringing intimate stories of loss, grief and mobilization to the centre of energy history. Her vivid descriptions of mining disasters and their political consequences demonstrate the human costs of coal and the interrelationship between death and injury, miners’ power and dependency on fossil fuels. The major original insights this approach offers are most visible through the rise and fall of the Miners for Democracy movement in a decade of coalfield rebellion from the late 1960s. Working miners, black lung campaigners and their families overthrew a corrupt trade union regime, winning major improvements in miners’ conditions and disability compensation as well as commitments to a national energy order centred on coal. Yet by the early 1980s these alliances had dissipated following the miners’ defeat in a major strike over 1977–78. Coal production was no longer as concentrated in Appalachia and even where it was, environmentally and economically destructive surface extraction had edged out deep mining.
The commitment to a dynamic and iterative conception of miners’ agency that animates Energy Citizenship is a model for labour, energy and political historians to follow. Kahle succeeds in drawing together the complex threads of flows of coal, the distribution of electricity and the conception of political ideas around them, offering a highly original account of the American century.
