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WORK TITLE: Smokestacks in the Hills
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Daisytown
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.chatham.edu/history/facultydetails.cfm?FacultyID=108 * https://www.chatham.edu/news/index.php/2015/10/chatham-news/chathams-dr-lou-martin-publishes-new-book-on-industrialization * http://triblive.com/news/washington/9347140-74/history-university-workers * http://www.wvgazettemail.com/life/20160508/historian-lou-martin-to-discuss-new-book-smokestacks-in-the-hills
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 96100065
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n96100065
HEADING: Martin, Lou
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100 1_ |a Martin, Lou
670 __ |a Hancock County, c2006: |b t.p. (Lou Martin) p. 4 of cover (working on his Ph.D. in history at West Virginia Univ.)
953 __ |a vk03 |b lh08
PERSONAL
Born c. 1972; married; wife’s name Krista.
EDUCATION:West Virginia University, B.A., 1994, Ph.D., 2008; Carnegie Mellon University, M.A., 2001.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, assistant professor of history.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lou Martin is a writer and assistant professor of history at Chatham University. He received his B.A. from West Virginia University, his M.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. fromWest Virginia University.
Martin grew up fifteen miles from Weirton, West Virginia, where his Father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He lives in Daisytown, PA, with his wife, Krista.
Martin’s book, Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural Industrial Workers in West, arose out of his graduate dissertation. Interested in the culture of rural-industrial workers, like that of the community in which he was raised, Martin began recording oral histories of retired steel and pottery mill workers located in Hancock County, West Virginia. The book emerged out of research derived from these oral histories, as well as from census records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and author interviews.
Martin provides a history of the region and how rural industry became the predominant career path and way of life for residents. Industrialists arrived in Appalachia in the 1890s, looking for cheap labor in first generation immigrants. The workers they found were a mix of European immigrants, poor Southern sharecroppers, and Appalachian farmers.
The ensuing culture resulted in a mixture of preindustrial and industrial traditions. Workers sought out industry jobs while simultaneously maintaining self-sufficiency through hunting and farming and a loyalty to local governing. As unionizing attempts gained popularity in larger cities in the 1930s and 40s, rural-industrial workers were deterred by the violent retaliation against union attempts and the seeming failure of the New Deal. They resisted expansion of the welfare state and national trade unionism, drawn more toward an establishment of localism.
In the 1940s and 50s, workers were able to gain the same sorts of protections as union workers elsewhere by threatening to unionize, encouraging their employers to provide them with similar benefits. In the 1960s, as equity movements began to take hold across the nation, the pottery and steel industries both saw an overall decline. Mechanization and offshoring led to less need for local workers, resulting in a struggling rural-industrial community that continues today. Martin explains that the rural-industrial state of West Virginia communities will not last forever and will likely be replaced by cheaper labor in other areas of the world.
Keith D. Orejel in Journal of Southern History described Smokestacks in the Hills as “a valuable study that sheds new light on the overlooked historical experiences of rural-industrial workers.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Keith D. Orejel, review of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia, p. 204.
Labour/Le Travail, 2017, Lachlan Mackinnon Travail, review of Smokestacks in the Hills, p. 288.*
Lou Martin is an assistant professor of history at Chatham University.
Historian Lou Martin to discuss new book ‘Smokestacks in the Hills’
Anna Patrick , Staff Writer
May 8, 2016
Courtesy photo
Lou Martin will speak at Taylor Books Thursday about his new book “Smokestacks in the Hills.”
MAY
12
LOU MARTIN
Location: Taylor Books
When: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Related Facts
Want to Go?
Taylor Talks: Lou Martin, Historian and author of “Smokestacks in the Hills”
WHEN: 6 p.m. Thursday
WHERE: Taylor Books, 226 Capitol St. in downtown Charleston
COST: Free
INFO: Contact Taylor Books at 304-342-1461
Lou Martin grew up in the suburbs.
Well, sort of.
His father was an engineer and his mother taught in a nearby school. They settled 15 miles outside of Weirton in a small housing development owned by a retired steel worker. Martin could count the number of homes in his development on two hands.
The place, he said, was puzzling.
“I had trouble figuring out if I lived in the suburbs or not. I knew we didn’t live in a city neighborhood. I knew we weren’t living on a farm. I couldn’t explain the nature of the place I lived in,” Martin said.
Sandwiched between Ohio and Pennsylvania, Hancock County had become a blending of sorts.
Like most parts of West Virginia, a strong self-sustaining culture permeated the area for generations. You hunted and had a garden out back. And if you didn’t, you knew someone, a friend or family member, who did.
But the northernmost county of West Virginia also had become a large industrial hub. Steel and pottery mills, with their towering smokestacks, stood out along the Ohio River. For decades, the mills provided a tremendous number of jobs.
In 1979 Weirton Steel was the largest job provider in the state, according a 2013 report by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. Kids didn’t have to move away for college or work because they knew they had a job at Weirton Steel waiting for them after high school.
“Just about everybody’s dad worked in the mill,” Martin said. He recalled classmates coming to junior high in welding caps in the ’80s. They wanted to look like their dads.
Weirton, which formed after industry tycoon Ernest T. Weir moved his tinplate company from Clarksburg to a farm along the banks of the Ohio River in 1909, and other towns in Hancock County became a rural-industrial hub.
As a history student pursuing his doctorate at West Virginia University in the early 2000s, Martin took an interest in understanding what defined the place he called home and what made the culture of rural-industrial workers, like his friends’ fathers, so distinctive.
He started interviewing people. He recorded the oral histories of retired steel and pottery mill workers. Interviewees shared stories of women getting fired when their Weirton Steel supervisors discovered they were married. They shared how the promise of work lured European immigrants in the early 1900s, so by the 1930s Weirton’s population of 15,000 covered 47 different nationalities.
The research Martin completed for his dissertation — including the collection of 35 oral histories — forms the basis for his new book, “Smokestacks in the Hills.”
Martin, who now teaches U.S. history at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, will be speaking about his book at 6 p.m. Thursday at Taylor Books in Charleston. The event is free, and refreshments will be provided along with alcoholic beverages for sale. Martin will be on hand after to chat and sign copies of his book.
When he began collecting oral histories, Martin said, he envisioned a different narrative than the one he found.
“When I set out to do my first interviews, I wanted to replicate what other labor historians had done in Chicago and Detroit. ... I wanted to find the same kind of stories of downtrodden workers rising up against oppression in my hometown,” Martin said.
But that’s not what he found.
Instead he found stories of men who returned to their farm after a long day at the mills. He met men and women who were skeptical of joining strikes. He conversed with people who preferred local control over the government and economy.
He didn’t find stories of workers desperate to join national unions. He didn’t find people ready to jump on Democratic workers’ rights initiatives. He didn’t find the same industrial workers so many labor historians had written about in cities.
He found a different type of worker.
He found Walter Danna. A son of Italian immigrants, Danna worked for Weirton Steel. To help supplement his income, he hunted a variety of wild animals — pheasant, rabbit and squirrel. He and his father trapped muskrats and sold their pelts for cash.
He told Martin you had to wait a few weeks after groundhogs were finished hibernating before hunting them. If you killed them too soon, their meat tasted like mud.
When Martin returned to the world of academia with stories like Danna’s, it confused other labor historians. For them, Martin said, the narrative of living off the land and making do “created an image of steel workers living in desperate poverty. ... They couldn’t understand. They thought he must have been living on the break of starvation.”
But that wasn’t the case.
Danna wasn’t poor. He was living within his culture — a culture that promoted growing your own food versus buying a lot of things at the store. It was a make-do attitude.
“He’s sort of the quintessential rural-industrial worker in my mind,” Martin said.
Unlike the many narratives written about urban-industrial workers, Martin’s new book covers an area that hasn’t received much academic exploration.
In “Smokestacks in the Hills,” Martin explores and explains why industrial workers in northern West Virginia were different from the workers living and working in industrial cities like Detroit or Pittsburgh. And he provides a thorough explanation as to how the steel and pottery mills ended up in the rural Ohio River Valley in the first place.
“Labor historians have tended to focus on dramatic events. That usually means a strike, a violent strike,” Martin said. “I ended up focusing on everyday life. There’s a certain drama of raising a family, working in a mill.”
To hear more of Martin’s findings, listen to his Taylor Talk at 6 p.m. Thursday. For more information, contact Taylor Books at 304-342-1461.
Newsmaker: Lou Martin
ANDREW CONTE | Friday, Nov. 6, 2015, 11:53 p.m.
SUBMITTED
Lou Martin's new book, “Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia” was published Nov. 2, 2015, by the University of Illinois Press.
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Noteworthy: His new book, “Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia” was published Monday by the University of Illinois Press.
Age: 43
Residence: Daisytown, Washington County
Family: Wife, Krista
Occupation: Associate professor of history, Chatham University
Background: The book looks at the history of steel and pottery workers in Hancock County, W.Va. Two-thirds of the county's workers were in those professions in 1950.
Education: West Virginia University, bachelor's degree in history, 1994; Carnegie Mellon University, master's degree in history, 2001; WVU, Ph.D. in history, 2008
Quote: “When I was a graduate student, a lot of the labor histories I was reading were written about big cities – Chicago, Detroit, New York City. I wanted to look at workers in a rural, small-town setting and see how their history might be different. I certainly found out there were important differences.”
Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural Industrial Workers in West
Virginia
Lachlan Mackinnon
Labour/Le Travail.
.79 (Spring 2017): p288.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
Full Text:
Lou Martin, Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural Industrial Workers in West Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2015)
HANCOCK COUNTY, sandwiched between the Ohio River and the Pennsylvania state line in northern West Virginia, provides the backdrop for
Lou Martin's fascinating study of 20th century rural-industrial workers. Pottery and tinplate manufacturing firms were introduced into this
Appalachian landscape in the 1890s as industrialists "searched for places where they could tap pools of low-wage first generation" workers. (5)
The resulting interplay between industrial and preindustrial traditions and practices formed the basis of a distinct rural working-class culture,
wherein a developed sense of localism worked against the establishment of more traditional forms of class consciousness. Unlike their urban
counterparts, industrial workers in Hancock County remained largely opposed to the goals of the New Deal coalition, such as the expansion of the
welfare state and national trade unionism. Martin traces the contours of their rural-industrial culture into the 1980s, when restructuring prompted
crises for rural and urban industrial workers alike.
The international processes of capital mobility, industrialization, and deindustrialization feature prominently. While the reader is treated to a rich
tableau of working-class life, movingly captured through a combination of oral history and archival research, Martin is clear: we are witnessing
but a brief moment in a much longer story of Schumpterian creative destruction. Industries that once thrived in cities and towns throughout North
America and Europe have moved to areas of the globe with depressed labour costs and lower rates of unionization. "Meanwhile, in places like
Chengdu, China, a new generation of factory workers is emerging and developing a new rural-industrial culture." (12) Martin's work will be of
particular interest to scholars examining the history of global capitalism.
Several factors influenced the rise of the "rural-industrial worker." Industrialization brought immigration; labourers from Europe, poor
sharecroppers from the South, and dispossessed farmers from the Appalachian hollers streamed into Hancock County between the 1890s and
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1930s. Importing their folkways, these rural migrants established practices for supplementing the necessities of life. Establishing small plots of
arable "common land" (74) outside of the city limits offered some measure of self-sufficiency--and allowed for the development of a family
economy model that contrasted with the breadwinner ideal exhibited by skilled craft workers.
Intra-union tensions during the 1930s set the stage for the entrenchment of anti-labour attitudes that marked a significant divergence from the
radicalism of many urban workers. In 1933, shortly after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, ten thousand unorganized workers
at the Weirton Steel Works walked out in protest of the company union and sought affiliation with the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel,
and Tin Workers (AAISTW). Michael Tighe, AAISTW president, immediately denounced the strike--fearing rank-and-file militancy. Meanwhile,
private security at Weirton enacted a campaign of systematic violence against union organizers--supported in the courts by sympathetic judges.
The failure of conservative unionism, the viciousness of private employers, and the apparent ineffectual legalities of the New Deal prompted the
rural-industrial workers of Hancock County to turn inward and pursue non-confrontational "older strategies for improving their quality of life."
(91)
Martin's comparative analysis of these strategies during the 1940s and 1950s is stark. While their urban counterparts sought collectively
bargained contracts on a national level, pottery and steel workers in Hancock County relied on entrenched localism to shape labour negotiations
through smaller independent organizations. At Weirton Steel, for example, workers used the threat of unionization as a pressure tactic against the
company without having to participate in the national steel strikes of the United Steelworkers. In these ways, the rural-industrial steelworkers
were able to achieve many of the benefits of their unionized brethren without facing the threat of personal fiscal insolvency, mortgage defaults, or
blacklists. Within this argument, Martin probes at the contours of identity and class. Rather than the emergent class solidarities and labour politics
evidenced within American industrial cities, ruralindustrial workers in Hancock County drew upon pre-industrial, individualist habits of "making
do."
This self-sufficiency took many forms, as Martin reveals in his discussion of the gendered aspects of "making-do" in both the factory and the
home. In the pottery industry, where women were increasingly employed during and after World War II, female employees banded together to
protect their economic position from the downgrading and undervaluing that so frequently affects women workers. In the Weirton mills, the
confluence of masculinity and occupational identity was reconstructed in the post-war years--when women were pushed from positions they had
occupied during wartime. Martin also describes the household production of food and other consumables. In Hancock County, it was not
uncommon for rural-industrial workers to keep pigs, chickens, and other livestock well into the 1950s as a form of wage supplementation.
Hunting, angling, and gardening are also examined as cultural manifestations of this rural-industrial culture. The continuation of these ideals,
Martin argues, "put the steel and pottery workers in Hancock County out of step with labor liberals' agenda of extending the welfare state" (151)
through the mid-20th century.
The localism exhibited by these men and women was strained by the 1960s. National equality movements opened new avenues for economic
independence among both African Americans and women in the pottery factories and steel mills, but these gains represented a cruel irony--as
both industries soon entered periods of protracted crisis and downsizing. Increasingly faced with mechanization, automation, and offshoring, the
workers of Hancock County suffered through the long decline experienced in many American cities since the 1970s. Despite a brief flirtation with
employee ownership at Weirton during the 1990s, workers were stymied by a government that was hesitant to legislate to protect their
livelihoods. Global forces may have played out differently in rural Appalachia than in urban industrial centres, but in the end they revealed the
illusory nature of life under industrial capitalism. Martin quotes a Weirton steelworker who expresses a sentiment common to many throughout
North America: "We downsized, we modernized, we made sacrifices. But none of that matters. It's still not good enough." (183)
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This book is a timely intervention. The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States has revealed the extent to which the
underlying assumptions of neoliberalism have been rejected in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Labour historians have long
articulated the inhumanity of a political discourse that has--rhetorically and economically -abandoned vast swathes of the country. In many ways,
the 2016 election was a re-assertion of political power by residents of the socalled "Rust Belt." The growth, development, and challenges of
working-class cultures are important to understand if we are to begin coming to terms with the strong support in these regions for resurgent
messages of economic nationalism and populism. These issues are certain to provide fertile ground for future discussions--both academic and
popular--and Martin's historical analysis of working life in Hancock County provides a perspective that is both relevant and illuminating.
LACHLAN MACKINNON
Saint Mary's University
Mackinnon, Lachlan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mackinnon, Lachlan. "Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural Industrial Workers in West Virginia." Labour/Le Travail, no. 79, 2017, p. 288+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA493809010&it=r&asid=56c707c2a7fe3bb440623d35ec7e7f72. Accessed 8 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493809010
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Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West
Virginia
Keith D. Orejel
Journal of Southern History.
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p204.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia. By Lou Martin. The Working Class in American History. (Urbana and other
cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 239. Paper, $28.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08102-6; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03945-4.)
Lou Martin's Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia provides an in-depth study of rural working-class culture in
Hancock County, West Virginia. An exhaustively researched book that draws on census records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and author
interviews, Smokestacks in the Hills makes a significant scholarly contribution by placing rural people and places at the forefront of twentiethcentury
labor history.
The time frame of Martin's book is expansive, tracing the transformation of Hancock County from a nineteenth-century agricultural region, to an
up-and-coming industrial area in the first half of the twentieth century, and then finally into a struggling factory zone starting in the late 1960s.
The book opens by surveying Hancock County's agricultural origins in an attempt to show the cultural imprint left by farm families. Martin
strongly suggests that nineteenth-century fanners bequeathed to later rural-industrial workers a lasting faith in local autonomy and community
self-reliance. Although this is an intriguing claim, the book only vaguely explains how these traditions were transmitted over time as the county
experienced population turnover and demographic shifts due to industrialization.
Adding to the scholarly literature on corporate relocation, Martin shows how pottery and steel manufacturers responded to competition by
moving factories to rural Hancock County in the early 1900s. Providing new insights into the nature of capital mobility, Martin argues that
industrialists used the shift to the countryside to implement new technologies and to deskill their workforce. The book also depicts how industrial
restructuring led to the formation of a distinct rural working class.
The narrative heart of the book covers the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Martin's central argument is that rural-industrial workers failed to be
incorporated into either the national labor movement or the New Deal coalition. While urban workers flooded into national unions like the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and voted for Democratic politicians, rural-industrial workers like those in Hancock County preferred
to rely on their families, their communities, and even their employers to safeguard their welfare and resisted the allure of the CIO. Rural laborers
also remained outside the New Deal order throughout the 1940s and 1950s, voting for "conservative politicians," like the Republican Arch
Moore, who favored placing "limits on union power" (p. 118).
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According to Martin, localism accounted for rural workers' repudiation of the national labor movement and New Deal liberalism. He argues that
"rural working-class culture privileged place and local community over class" (p. 2). Displaying values inherited from nineteenth-century
agrarians, workers in Hancock County "voiced suspicions of national unions and powerful union officials," fearing that control would shift from
local communities to "distant, impersonal bureaucracies" (p. 10). Rural workers favored independent unions that maintained the "local nature of
labor relations" through "face-to-face communication" with management (pp. 92, 10). Independent organizations were seen as more responsive to
local demands and, therefore, as more conducive to community autonomy.
Unlike urban laborers, who turned to the welfare state to provide a safety net, rural-industrial workers used their access to productive property to
weather hard times. Drawing on the agrarian tradition of "making do," working-class families supplemented their paychecks by growing produce
in household gardens (p. 10). These rural "survival strategies tended to strengthen their localism and weaken their commitment to New Deal
coalition goals such as a more robust welfare state and union protections" (p. 10).
While Martin's emphasis on localism is generally persuasive, there are other explanations that the author overlooks. For a book that focuses on
capital mobility, it is interesting that the author does not give much credence to the idea that rural workers rejected national labor organizations
out of fear of factory relocation. Perhaps not participating in the labor movement was the price Hancock County workers had to pay to avoid
capital flight.
These criticisms aside, Martin's argument is novel and compelling, showing how place and locality represented a major impediment for the labor
movement and New Deal coalition. On the whole, Smokestacks in the Hills is a valuable study that sheds new light on the overlooked historical
experiences of rural-industrial workers.
Keith D. Orejel
University of Missouri
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Orejel, Keith D. "Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p.
204+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354179&it=r&asid=2f61433befc15e6a2649d0f08aee76ec. Accessed 8 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354179