Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Abstract

Poor Man's Fortune examines the white working-class men who labored in the lead and zinc mines along the boundaries of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Because these miners opposed social-democratic labor unions and politics in the period leading up to the New Deal, they have not typically received attention from labor historians. They stood apart from the idea of a class-based solidarity, particularly as practiced by the Western Federation of Miners and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, often doing so with what Jarod Roll calls “a powerful animus” (p. 1). They worked as strikebreakers, objected to government attempts to impose health and safety regulations despite the dangers of lung disease, and resisted government encouragement to organize for better pay and working conditions. Over the past few decades, new labor historians have focused on how men and women collectively struggled to improve their working conditions through unions and social movements, and how they challenged their employers, the state, and capitalism. This approach to the study of labor was best exemplified by David Montgomery, who argued that workers in America “developed ‘an ideology of mutualism’” that embraced collective action as critical to their organizing success and to their ability to transcend differences of race, ethnicity, and gender (p. 3). Roll's intervention into this historiography is as significant as it is richly detailed, thoughtfully argued, and a joy to read.