Reviewed by: The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century Priscilla Long (bio) The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century. By Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 275. $65/ $24.95. Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht's The Face of Decline is essential reading for anyone concerned with the economic development or redevelopment of a community, region, or state. It is also a definitive history of the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania that by 1890 was supplying 16 percent of the nation's energy. The book's handsome, large-format pages conceal its great length, including detailed chapters that narrate (title notwithstanding) the early decades when the industry was raking in profits. These provide ballast for what follows—an account of eighty years of decline, ending in regional economic collapse. The anthracite region comprises three distinct coalfields, with Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, and Pottsville—all once-thriving towns—serving as urban centers of districts that were essentially rural and remote. In hard coal's heyday, an "imperial cartel"—the anthracite railroads—controlled an industry financed by outside investors. Modes of development, the authors observe, are mirrored in modes of decline. When the industry began its slide during the 1920s (with the competition from oil and natural gas), these investors dis-invested in a region in which they had no stake. This coincided with John Lewis's rise within the United Mine Workers of America and the union's subsequent abandonment of anthracite coal miners. After World War II, with coal-mining jobs going up in smoke, the elites of several towns went on campaigns to diversify the regional economy. Quasi-official municipal organizations such as the Scranton Industrial Development Corporation mounted fundraising drives to assist entering firms by abating taxes, building industrial parks, and offering generous leases on buildings. But local public–private campaigns, spurred by inadequate state and federal programs, pitted one town against another and therefore discouraged comprehensive regional planning. Certainly there were successes, but ultimately these efforts garnered mostly low-wage jobs, to the disgruntlement of working people who had donated to the campaigns. New companies provided fewer jobs than projected, some departed after their tax breaks expired, and others went bankrupt. Today, the region that fueled the industrialization of America has turned to the landfill business. The environment, far from being reclaimed, is being converted into a toxic-waste dump. (Prisons also provide jobs.) The catastrophe of the Centralia coal-mine fire—it ignited in 1962 and has since destroyed the town—symbolizes the devastation of the region; so also do boarded-up business districts and Scranton's "distressed municipality" status. [End Page 205] At every turn, Dublin and Licht place the decline of the anthracite coalfields into a comparative framework. They are neither didactic nor reductive: in some ways the anthracite region differs from the Midwest rustbelt or the lumber-depressed Pacific Northwest. Still, anthracite is not utterly unique. It is useful to learn of the Maytag Corporation's low-tax, low-wage dalliance in Galesburg, Illinois, before departing for Mexico and of Great Britain's far more effective response to the decline of its coal industry, continuing even into the Thatcher era of re-privatization. The history of anthracite coal does have a bright side: the spirit, tenacity, pride, and community-oriented values of its people. What the authors call the "mothers and fathers" generation grew up during the 1920s and 1930s; they were born to Irish or later-arriving Eastern and Southern European immigrants who had streamed into northeastern Pennsylvania back when coal was king. These mothers and fathers alike remained attached to the coalfields and to their close-knit, ethnically diverse communities. Decline divided this generation into "persisters"—families who stayed and made do with less—and commuters—families whose ex-miners car-pooled with others to heavy-industry, out-of-region jobs and returned home on weekends. A third group migrated out, but even these families came home to visit or bury their dead or retire. Successive economic shocks catalyzed a shift in sex roles, as Dublin and Licht meticulously delineate. Older women increasingly worked...