Factory Workers in the Hills of West Virginia: The Values and Politics of Rural Industrial Workers in Hancock County, 1930–1965

Abstract

When he was a young man in the 1950s and 1960s, Walter Danna used to hunt to supplement his family's diet. He fondly remembered hunting groundhogs, but he cautioned that you had to wait a couple of weeks after they were done hibernating before you bagged them or else they had a “mud taste.” Let them eat some grass and work that out of their system, he said. Danna was not a frontiersman, living in some remote, undeveloped wilderness. He spent his whole career as a steelworker in Hancock County, West Virginia. Yet his experiences and his lifestyle were quite different from industrial workers living in major cities. Steel and pottery workers in the rural environment of Hancock County adapted rural habits to the dictates of modern industrial capitalism. As a result, their values and their politics diverged from those of the more metropolitan segment of the American working class.