American Metal Miners and the Lure of Capitalism, 1850-1950

FAIN: FA-251814-17

Jarod Roll
University of Mississippi (University, MS 38677-1848)

A book-length study of American miners in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma and their opposition to labor unions, occupational safety regulations, and environmental reforms.

Poor Man’s Fortune is the history of how some white American workers, in this case, lead and zinc miners in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, rejected the security of labor unions, government reforms, and environmental safeguards from the 1850s to the 1950s. Rather than seek negative explanations for this pattern, as other labor historians might, I instead show how the pattern emerged as these communities embraced, over several decades, the physical, financial, and environmental risks of industrial capitalism in order to seek its rewards. This study, which is based on research in archives across the U.S., offers a grassroots study of anti-union, anti-government white workers that, unlike dominant trends in American labor and political history, takes their perspective seriously. More broadly, Poor Man’s Fortune speaks to issues of sustainability in industrial society by interrogating the dilemmas of people whose labor undermined the viability of their livelihoods and communities.

Associated Products

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 (Book)
Title: Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950
Author: Jarod Roll
Abstract: White working-class conservatives have played a decisive role in American history, particularly in their opposition to social justice movements, radical critiques of capitalism, and government help for the poor and sick. While this pattern is largely seen as a post-1960s development, Poor Man's Fortune tells a different story, excavating the long history of white working-class conservatism in the century from the Civil War to World War II. With a close study of metal miners in the Tri-State district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Jarod Roll reveals why successive generations of white, native-born men willingly and repeatedly opposed labor unions and government-led health and safety reforms, even during the New Deal. With painstaking research, Roll shows how the miners' choices reflected a deep-seated, durable belief that hard-working American white men could prosper under capitalism, and exposes the grim costs of this view for these men and their communities, for organized labor, and for political movements seeking a more just and secure society. Roll's story shows how American inequalities are in part the result of a white working-class conservative tradition driven by grassroots assertions of racial, gendered, and national privilege.
Year: 2020
Access Model: Purchase in paper and electronic versions.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1469656298
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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