TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 365 out the book, is the establishment of a science-based agricultural lobby in Washington. Advocates offarmers’ rights, typically congress men from farm states, saw guano as a key link between domestic interests and foreign affairs. Their success in raising bird feces to the level of a precious metal or other national security resource tells a tale of more than passing contemporary interest. Even without photographs, Skaggs provides a vivid account ofhow the federal gov ernment can indeed meddle in the private marketplace when the supply-demand-timing equation is right. Other examples are com mon today, but they usually concern research and development rather than the actual procurement of commercial goods. Ah, the 19th century, when a barren rock island could become an American territory for the sake of the bird dung that covered it. David H. Shayt Mr. Shayt is with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, spe cializing in hand tools and their historic uses. SlossFurnaces and the Rise ofthe Birmingham District: An IndustrialEpic. By W. David Lewis. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1995. Pp. xxiv+645; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95. Alabamians had to start industrializing their state all over again after Union cavalry destroyed their furnaces, mills, and factories in 1865. A cluster of entrepreneurs, most of them former officers of the Confederate Army, undertook to create a new city they hopefully named Birmingham, whose industries and railroads would exploit nearby iron ore and coal resources. Although they had little capital and few knowledgeable artisans, the Birmingham boosters attracted northern investors and brought engineers and artisans south to build ironworks, including in 1881 the Sloss furnaces. Rural Alabam ians eagerly traded sharecropping exhausted soil for labor on the charging platforms and pig beds of blast furnaces, or in the coal and ore mines that supplied them. The Sloss managers found a market niche in smelting merchant pig iron for northern foundries. Do not be misled by the title: David Lewis’s book is a comprehen sive study of industry in the postbellum South. As he explores the context of the Sloss furnaces, Lewis examines the associated Bir mingham and southern industries: railroading, coal and ore mining, and cokemaking. He compares the choices made by the Sloss man agers, who stuck closely to one product, with those made at the Bir mingham ironworks bought by northern steelmakers: they became part of a larger, diversified industry that also advanced concepts of welfare capitalism that southern owners and managers rejected. Lewis provides generous material so readers can follow the intricate maneuvers that kept Sloss profitable on and off for sixty years. Sloss’s particular challenge resulted from Alabama’s natural re sources, the demands of financiers located in Richmond and New 366 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE York, an unmotivated workforce, and the adoption by others of new techniques for making coke and tonnage steel. The high phospho rus content of the ore and the low strength of coke made from Ala bama coal meant that Sloss could not compete with northern fur naces unless the proprietors found some offsetting advantages. To counterbalance high production and transportation costs, Sloss’s managers used a uniquely southern institution, convict labor sup plied by the state. They substituted large numbers of workers for capital investment in their mines and furnaces. Flowing from these decisions were indifference to environmental consequences, and working conditions for both blacks and whites that made migration to the north attractive. In the context ofsouthern culture, Sloss man agers could not engender the artisanal and engineering skills needed for sustained success. Southerners had been in the forefront of iron-casting technique with Virginia’s Bellona gun foundry and, later, the Tredegar works. Nevertheless, as Lewis observes, Birmingham industrial boosters thought of steelmaking as the best route to prosperity, and thought less of the foundry industry'. He reminds us that historians, focused on steelmaking, have also neglected the foundry trades, perhaps be cause foundries had neither the drama of Bessemer converters nor the glamor of the Gilded Age capitalists who assembled the steel industry. Foundry technique remained the domain of a few skilled pattern makers and molders. For a while, southern foundries...