Peter Crow. Do, Die, or Get Along: A Tale of Two Appalachian Towns. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. xxiv + 220 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-2871-3.
Reviewed by Phil Wood (Department of Political Studies, Queen's University)
Published on H-Southern-Industry (March, 2008)
After the Coal Rush
Do, Die, or Get Along is a story of two towns, St. Paul and Dante, located in the coal country of southwestern Virginia, as told by twenty-six local residents. St. Paul is an incorporated town that grew at a junction in the local rail network, and Dante is a former coal company community. The two towns are located six miles apart, about thirty miles west of Interstate 81 at Abingdon, Virginia. The twenty-six narrators, divided about evenly between the two communities, come from a variety of backgrounds. They comprise ten women and sixteen men. The group includes African Americans, students, retired miners and postal workers, educators, and regional and environmental planners, as well as a lawyer, mining association executive, social worker, union executive, minister, and small business owner. Several are also community activists. The variation is important, since Peter Crow, who edits the narratives, is at pains to document the range of identities in the region. Rejecting standard stereotypes of Appalachians as either "barefoot, ignorant, clannish and violent" or "tragic victims of outside intervention," Crow argues that the narrators are representative of the range of ordinary Americans, recounting stories about the way they have dealt with historical events and problems in practical ways using the resources that were available to them (p. xiii). The stories, he insists, are American stories, even if they have an Appalachian flavor. As a whole, the narrative is designed to address "the great American question--can we survive our own success" (p. xiv)?
Three themes, all interconnected by coal, dominate the book. The first is the cycle of coal-based growth and decline, which provides the gestalt around which the stories are told. It also frames the central political and social paradox with which the narrators repeatedly struggle--that a region that has been the source of such enormous wealth for the country (and which remains a region of extraordinary natural fecundity) should be one of the country's main pockets of poverty, unemployment, and ill health. Coal shaped the histories of the two towns after the Civil War, first, by providing jobs and a degree of social stability during the period of coal-fired American industrialization. Later, as demand for coal declined and as the deep mines of the Appalachian region became increasingly uncompetitive, coal's influence was felt in terms of the gradual withdrawal of mining capital from the region and the now all-too-common challenges faced by communities that lose their economic foundation.
The second theme is a story of the two towns, in particular, an account of the long-term effects of corporate paternalism in one case and its absence in the other. At its peak during World War I, Dante was a boomtown with a population of about four thousand. Larger than St. Paul, it enjoyed a range of company-provided services--a company store, a pharmacy, a doctor, a hospital, a clinic, nurses, schools, churches, baseball fields, and a cinema. According to the narrators, the town was virtually self-sufficient, making travel to other communities unnecessary. Its sole employer--the Clinchfield Coal Company, which became a subsidiary of Pittston in the 1940s--kept competing employers out. The town's decline began in the mid-1920s, when depression hit the resource sector. During the 1930s, the company spread available work so that everybody made enough to pay rent and keep their company houses. Debts at the company store were often written off for "good miners" (p. 63). Unionization and mechanization in the immediate aftermath of World War II, combined with the effects of the shift to an oil-based economy, dramatically reduced demand for labor. In 1959, what remained of the mining industry in Dante was closed. Some miners were able to find work in other mines in the region, but the rest became part of an exodus northward into the manufacturing belt around the Great Lakes states. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, deep mining in southwestern Virginia had all but disappeared, though strip mining and mountaintop removal--whose opponents, according to the mining association executive, are "stopping the opportunity we have to create more level land"--still produced about thirty-five million tons of coal per year, but with a drastically reduced labor force (p. 94). Dante is now a town of about three hundred houses and eight hundred people, having lost not only its main source of jobs, but also its corporate offices, its hotel, the building that formerly housed its company store, its school, and all the services formerly provided by the company.
In contrast, St. Paul, as an incorporated town, developed outside the direct control of coal companies. It had its own government, social services, tax revenues, and, crucially, "people who have a history of owning and operating businesses, and who have a real interest in keeping the business district going" (p. 63). It developed a public educational system, which, in turn, increased the likelihood of independent political and legal action, and which has recently become one of the focal points of an interesting and effective environmental reclamation movement. Its streets were paved by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. There had also been some limited attempts to diversify the local economy. It has a vibrant associational life, mostly revolving around the schools and the community's eleven churches. St. Paul still had to face significant problems, with a weak economic base, high unemployment, and a population disproportionately dependent on government provision of retirement and welfare checks and worker's compensation. Nevertheless, for the editor, the contrast provides a significant lesson about the benefits of autonomy in the struggle to survive regional deindustrialization. Crow states, "The narrative shows how Dante has declined to little more than a community of homes and churches, whereas St. Paul remains a viable economic, political entity with basic services intact. It is a pattern seen over and over in southwestern Virginia" (p. 187).
The title of the book is taken from the third theme: do, die, or get along. The early stages of development in St. Paul, Dante, and the surrounding region were dominated by a "do or die" culture. Farmers had to clear land or starve; violence was the primary way to settle conflicts; and miners were responsible for their own safety in the mines, and were paid, or not, according to the quantity and quality of what they produced. For Crow, this began to change in the twentieth century, as residents gradually came to see the advantages of "getting along." Foreign and African American workers, brought in when labor was short or to act as strikebreakers, initially faced hostility, but later they formed bonds of solidarity with the locals who were crucial in campaigns to organize unions. By the 1930s, this supposedly isolated Appalachian region had a population that included thirty-two nationalities. Later, federal law forced unions and companies to coexist and cooperate on occupational safety, environmental, and other matters. More recently, corporate withdrawal and the ensuing deindustrialization have forced individuals and organizations to form cooperative relationships to focus on the question of community survival. The best progress has been made in St. Paul, with its stronger tradition of autonomous cultural and political action, and the women's and environmental movements played an important role in the emerging getting along culture in that town. In Dante, however, the task is much more difficult and cultural and other resources more limited, so that getting along has not been as successful in addressing the process of decline. The future of the town remains unclear, despite the best efforts of its citizens.
Narrative projects, such as Do, Die, or Get Along, inevitably raise a range of questions, primarily epistemological ones, about the status and value of stories told by those who have participated in the historical process. Crow makes it clear that he is reluctant to go too far in adding his own perspective to the narratives, arguing that it is high time that the people of Appalachia had a chance to use their own voices. He provides only brief indications of the way he situates the narratives as social knowledge. He notes that there is a risk that "the memories of people who live in a place can also produce a fiction" (p. 189). But, the value of the project remains, he says, since "the primary interest in memories is how they shape a narrator's values and actions, not how accurate or reliable they are" (p. 189). Rejecting the "broad, abstract, so-called objective claims to truth," which dominate much of contemporary historiography and social science, and citing in support the work of Clifford Geertz, Alasdair McIntyre, and others, Crow argues for an approach to historical understanding that relies on "thick description" of purposive historical local action that is intimately interrelated with cultural and ethical standards and with transformative possibilities (p. ix). But, the unfortunate side effect of this reluctance to interpret is that it leaves us to choose between cultural relativism, on the one hand, and abstracted empiricism of conventional social science, on the other. This is a false dichotomy, since between Scylla and Charybdis it is possible to find schools of social science thought that reject both abstract propositional social science and the insistence on cultural uniqueness. Do, Die, or Get Along is far more than "thick description" of a local culture. It is a substantial compilation of practical knowledge, produced through social activity and designed to adapt to and alter the world the narrators inherited. Substantial elements of the narrative identify a structural reality and a series of strategic reactions to that reality, by a variety of agents, which will be easily understood by those with comparative social science interests. The practical knowledge captured here has much to say about patterns of industrialization and deindustrialization; about the politics of domination in company towns (which are a normal organizational form in the early stages of industrialization just about everywhere); and about class, ethnic, and racial politics. To the degree that these are the concerns of comparative social science generally, this, then, is a work of social science, not a local narrative.
For instance, students of southern politics will have no trouble recognizing a history formed by a high exploitation, low wage, environmentally destructive economy; nor will they fail to see the similarities between corporate paternalism and its long-term effects in Dante and in southern textile towns, like Kannapolis and Florence. If the hardships involved in mining coal created a propensity to unionize, which separated the Appalachian part of the South from the rest of the region, students of southern politics will also recognize the same corporate attitude toward unions and the same union avoidance strategies at work. In the Appalachians, unions were grudgingly accepted so long as there was coal to mine, and, in the process, they weakened company town paternalism and forced companies to adapt to a new political reality, at least temporarily. But, the structural power of coal capital (mechanization and the technological and geographic shifts to strip mining and mountaintop removal) quickly turned short-term victory into long-term defeat. What remains in southwestern Virginia is a region with strong union sympathies, but in which those sympathies can no longer be actualized: "a lot of people working today are nonunion because they have to work. They're scared. They've got a job and a lot of companies--not all of them--will say to them, 'If you join the union, we'll just shut down'" (p. 141). Even though the sympathies cannot be actualized, they, nevertheless, affect the region's long-term prospects: "the reason industry won't come here is because of the union background. They don't want to be in an area where there is union" (p. 184). In the textile belt, the same structural forces--mechanization and capital mobility--explain both why union victories were few and far between and why most of those victories proved to be so hollow in anything beyond the short term.
Likewise, those who study the transition to industrial capitalism in rural areas as well as transitional periods within capitalist development will quickly recognize the pivotal role played by occupational pluralism. In the Appalachians, where labor markets were often tight during the coal boom, an incomplete separation of workers from the land increased their leverage with respect to employers and played a role in the development of racial and ethnic "divide and conquer" strategies of labor control: "'It was a lot easier to control people who didn't own anything,'" recalled one narrator, whereas "'the natives owned land and could at least farm a little'" (pp. 24-25). During the Great Depression, when there was surplus labor, continued access to the land made it easier for employers to reduce wages and working time.
In a similar vein, there is ample evidence of the patterns of community adaptation to a deindustrialized, post-Fordist world to be found in comparable, and not so comparable, towns in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Most notable, here, are the importance of cross-class and interracial coalitions with deep local support as a means of deflecting claims about external intervention and the capture of local reform organizations by radical agitators. Equally significant are the roles played by environmental conservation and reclamation; by quality of life, tourism, and outdoor recreation concerns; by educational expansion; and by efforts to restore the preindustrial and industrial built environments in community rejuvenation.
As Crow points out in his concluding remarks, political and economic action are path dependent and socially and culturally embedded ("their sense of the past gives shape to what they do now"), and the narrators are individuals by virtue of the social relations in which they live ("The people who tell this story seem to find who they are as individuals primarily by working through and for their communities") (pp. 187, 195). But, this is true of all of us. The fact that humans and their practical knowledge develop in context does not preclude the possibility of structural, cultural, and other similarities between contexts, nor of similarities in the practical knowledge developed in them. Though the focus of the book is specific, Do, Die, or Get Along makes a contribution to both the literature on the political economy of Appalachian America and our understanding of more general pathways to the industrialized world. It also documents some of the ways communities try to adapt to deindustrialization and a new age of economic insecurity. The book flows smoothly (which is a credit to the editor), was a pleasure to read, and ought to be of interest to a wide variety of audiences, scholarly and otherwise.
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Citation:
Phil Wood. Review of Crow, Peter, Do, Die, or Get Along: A Tale of Two Appalachian Towns.
H-Southern-Industry, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14284
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