The Americanization of West Virginia: Creating a Modern Industrial State, 1916-1925

Abstract

Hennen explores West Virginia's integration into America's corporate political economy during and after World War I. Far from being isolated during America's transformation into a world power, West Virginia was squarely in the mainstream. The state's people and natural resources served crucial functions as producers and fuel for the postwar economy. Hennen examines a formative period in West Virginia's modern history that has been largely neglected beyond the traditional focus in the coal industry. Hennen looks at education, reform, and industrial relations in the state of the context of war mobilization, postwar instability, and national economic expansion. The First World War, he argues, consolidated the dominant positions of professionals, business people, and political capitalists as arbiters of national values. Corporate leaders employed public relations tactics that the Wilson administration had refined to gain public support for the war. Free-market business principles became synonymous with patriotic citizenship. Americanization, therefore, refers less to the assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream than to the attempt to encode values that would guarantee a literate and loyal producing class.