American labor history has long had a problem. Despite the widespread attention that generations of historians have given to the rise of class consciousness, solidarity, unionization, and the development of the labor movement, organized labor has never represented a majority of working-class Americans. At its peak, the AFL-CIO only represented 35 percent of all non-agricultural workers. Throughout most of US history, the workers who rejected unionization or remained un-unionized greatly outnumbered those who embraced collective action. Nevertheless, most of academic labor history has focused on the minority of American workers. This is not to suggest that this attention has been misplaced. The actions of the relatively small number of unionized workers have created the changes and reforms that altered the lives and working conditions for union and nonunion workers alike. But the tendency to treat unionization and working-class consciousness as the norm or natural state of the American worker has left labor historians with a blind spot. Historian Jarod Roll recognizes this problem and attempts to redress it in his impressively researched and convincingly argued account of over a century of resistance to unions, safety regulations, and social democracy among metal miners in the Tri-State mining district between Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.Poor Man's Fortune traces generations of miners and the anti-union labor ethics they forged over decades of excavating the rich deposits of zinc and lead in the Tri-State area. As Roll highlights throughout the book, their long history of resistance not only to unionization but also to government health and safety regulations presents an especially interesting counternarrative to the standard story of American labor. After all, it was the harsh conditions and exploitative practices of the mining industry that produced some of the nation's most radical and committed unionists in organizations like the Western Federation of Miners and Industrial Workers of the World. These unions and others like the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers did not ignore Tri-State miners: in fact, they made repeated efforts to organize the miners, with occasional if limited success at times of heightened insecurity and economic downturn. More often than not, Tri-State miners enthusiastically acted as strikebreakers and antagonists to union efforts. They repeatedly rejected mutualism from the Age of Jackson through the New Deal era. Rather than explain their resistance as a simple allegiance to individualism, Roll finds their commitment to self-interestedness in the way “hierarchies of race, gender, and nativity structured individual opportunities” (13). After the first generation of miners found prosperity by embracing the dangerous nature of metal mining, they established a shared economic experience and culture that promised risk-taking white men a future as independent owner-operators. They maintained faith in that future and sustained a desire to return to a bygone era for over a century, even as economic and mining industry changes made small independent mine operations increasingly impossible.Roll's discussions of race, nativism, and, especially, gender give further depth and texture to his analysis. His attention to the ways native-born white manhood shaped the miners’ relationship to their work and the broader mining industry reveals important dimensions of their acceptance of capitalism, the wage system, and unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. Roll shows how their veneration of “rough masculinity” and celebration of risks involved in metal mining, especially as they contrasted themselves with radical labor unions and immigrant laborers, created and maintained the expectation that they would reap the rewards of their labor. To Roll's great credit, he never seeks to dismiss the Tri-State miner's acceptance of a permanent wage system and capitalism or their rejection of labor unions and social democracy as naive or uninformed. Roll shows that the miners had agency over their own lives and fully understood their decisions, even when the consequences of those decisions led to objectively more precarious lives and dangerous working conditions. The miners’ resistance to safety regulations led to endemic cases of silicosis, for example. And while generations of miners held out hope that they would become owner-operators of their own mines, and a few did succeed, most remained underpaid and insecure wage workers. Yet Roll shows that they were not duped by capitalists or unaware of the risks they took. Rather, Tri-State miners accepted and even celebrated the risks that came along with being nonunion workers in an unhealthy and often dangerous job because they expected capitalism to work for native-born white men.There are few flaws in Roll's excellent study. His research is thorough and his arguments are persuasive. There are, however, a few lingering questions. While Roll's research into the work lives of Tri-State miners is superb, more attention to their culture away from the mines may have revealed important details about their long history of their resistance to mutualism. Roll is clear that religion did not play a significant role in their conservatism, an argument that is buttressed by the author's previous scholarship on working-class religion. But perhaps a further exploration of their cultural history away from the mining camps might have offered further explanation about how, for example, their anti-union and pro-capitalist values were passed down between generations of metal miners. Small questions like these should not take anything away from Roll's accomplishment. Poor Man's Fortune offers a nuanced, rich portrait of an important aspect of American labor history and a significant addition to a field that still wrestles with big questions about conservative elements within the American working class.