The war brought to the mountains a rush of activity that had not been seen since the early years of the century. Opportunities for jobs, business expansions, and the movement of young people into the war effort created a temporary respite from the hard times of the Depression, but this growth masked fundamental flaws in the region’s development. Most of Appalachia’s mineral and timber resources continued to be owned by outside corporations and controlled by nonresident interests. The value added from their extraction remained largely untaxed for local benefit. Moreover, a single-industry economy frustrated the diversification of local enterprises and tied most mountain communities to the vagaries of national and, increasingly, international markets. Local political leaders, many of whom benefited from their relationships to outside interests, continued to defend the status quo. The gap between traditional agricultural communities and rapidly modernizing urban centers beyond the region grew.
Although rising coal markets and expanding employment generated new sources of income, rationing and other austerity measures during the war prevented many consumer goods from reaching mountain residents. In the coal camps, company houses were simply patched and painted for the returning miners, and hospitals, schools, and other public facilities in the villages were left in disrepair. Even the spate of new truck mines placed additional burdens on public coffers to maintain the coal haul roads and contributed to the overexpansion of the industry itself. Overexpansion had plagued Appalachian coal mines in the 1920s, and following World War II it again led to instability and intense competition between the small mines and the larger producers. Since most of the truck mines were nonunion, miners in these smaller operations received lower wages and no benefits for their labor and were highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the coal market. Indeed, wartime demand and competition between the larger corporate mines and the new truck mines would increase the mechanization of the coal mining process, setting the stage for the eventual displacement of thousands of miners and their families.
The mechanization of the American coal industry was an evolutionary process, beginning as early as the 1890s, but new technology was slow to come to southern mines. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Appalachian coal mines depended primarily on the labor of men and boys to undercut and load their product for market. This was in part because of the lack of unionization and the availability of cheap labor, but it was also in part because of the expense and slow development of coal-loading technology. The introduction, for example, of mechanized undercutting equipment in larger mines early in the century actually increased the demand for workers to load coal and operate mechanical haulage systems. Undercutting machinery could produce many times more coal in an hour than the individual pick miner could blast “from the solid” in a day, but the technology required additional laborers to manage the equipment, to load the additional coal into gondolas, and to transport it to the surface. It was not until the introduction of mobile mechanical loaders on the eve of World War II that mechanization began to have a major impact on employment in the region, and only then as a by-product of union decisions and competition for postwar markets.
The end of the hand-loading era in Appalachia began during World War II, when a few larger mines introduced conveyor belts and new automatic loading machines into their pits to meet wartime contracts, but it was not until after the war that significant numbers of Appalachian mines began to utilize the new technology. Many of the region’s mining operations had been unionized under the New Deal, and although owners were able to resist pressures from John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to drive up wages and benefits during the war, most operators anticipated rising labor costs with the return of peace. When the UMWA established its Health and Retirement Funds in 1946 and launched a series of annual strikes that increased levies on coal production to finance the funds, larger union mines turned increasingly to mechanization to reduce labor costs and to compete with the burgeoning nonunion truck mines. By 1950, 69 percent of the nation’s coal was loaded by mechanical means, in comparison with 13 percent fifteen years earlier.12
The new mechanical loading equipment reduced the need for hand loading of coal just when large numbers of young men and women were returning home from the war with high expectations. This generation of mountain youth had grown up during the Depression and had been scattered across the globe by the war. They had experienced better housing, improved health care, and steady wages, and they had observed the comparative wealth of other parts of the country. Now they hoped for a brighter future for themselves and their children. Some expected to return to the mines. Others hoped for jobs as secretaries, welders, mechanics, and barbers, and still others planned to apply their GI benefits to acquire an education. Many returning veterans found the changes that had come to their communities overwhelming. “When I left here in 1941,” observed one veteran, “everybody was stone broke and had just about run out of ambition to do anything except draw relief rations, piddle around on the WPA and loaf. But when I got back home the mines were goin’ full blast and a lot of men who didn’t even have a job in 1941 was runnin’ two or three truck mines and had seventy five or a hundred thousand dollars in cash.”13
At first it appeared that the veterans’ hopes for a brighter future at home might be fulfilled, at least in some mountain communities. Although rural, agricultural areas continued to suffer economic decline, expectations remained high in the coal camps and other industrial centers. For a time, at least, the transition to peacetime production and the expansion of postwar markets sustained the coal boom. When Congress disbanded the wartime Office of Price Administration in 1946, coal prices soared, and a new flurry of mine openings swept the coalfields, fueling speculation that the good times would continue and temporarily disguising the inevitable consequences of mine mechanization.
By 1948, however, the postwar boom had run its course, and the demand for coal began to level off. The construction of new pipelines and refineries during the war increased the availability of oil and natural gas, and many of coal’s traditional consumers began to convert to these alternative energy sources. Not only were these fuels cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient, but industrialists concerned with consistent production had found them to be more reliable as well. A series of UMWA strikes following the war demonstrated Lewis’s ability to shut down national coal supplies and further confirmed coal’s reputation as a risky fuel because of the uncertainty of supplies. As homes, industries, railroads, and other consumers switched to oil, coal’s dominance over American energy markets weakened.14
The first mines to feel the return of hard times were the truck mines, which generally sold their product on the “spot” market and were not protected by long-term contracts. As the price of coal plummeted at the railhead, hundreds of “dog hole” mines that had sprung up overnight closed almost as quickly as they had appeared. Thousands of miners were laid off, and the gilded prosperity of the coal camps and commercial towns faded again. Some small-time operators who had amassed minor fortunes during the boom years lost everything. Others took what remained of their wealth and moved away. All those whose incomes were tied to the volatile truck mine sector—truck drivers, mechanics, merchants—saw their livelihoods dwindle. Everywhere a decided gloom settled over the coalfields.
Then, in 1950, the UMWA and the nation’s larger coal producers signed a labor contract that had monumental consequences in Appalachia. On the surface, the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of March 5, 1950, appeared to be a major victory for union miners. The contract raised wages and benefits across the industry and restored royalties to the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds while assuring stable production for companies by eliminating the “willing and able” (right to strike) clause of earlier agreements. Unionized coal companies had stopped paying into the Health and Retirement Funds in 1949 in response to declining coal prices and rising competition from nonunion, primarily southern Appalachian, mines. In retaliation, Lewis called a brief strike and later ordered a production slowdown until a new contract could be negotiated. The slowdown precipitated a national crisis in coal reserves, and the UMWA leader, fearing a federal takeover of the mines, agreed to a settlement proposed by George H.