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Reviews
| Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890–1930s. By Ken Fones-Wolf. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xxviii + 236 pp. Maps, photos, tables, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).
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This book on the glass industry in West Virginia explores the impact of industrial change on workers, communities, and the Appalachian region. But the goal of author Ken Fones-Wolf is not simply to tell a linear cause-and-effect story; rather, it is to show how labor and capital, culture and technology, politics and geography, local events and international trends all interacted and impinged on one another to influence regional development. |
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Fones-Wolf successfully accomplishes this complex task by using a case study approach. Focusing on three towns, each hosting a different branch of the glass industry (tableware, window glass, and containers), he offers a clear and concise description of how a variety of forces affected the local course of events in each town. He then draws connections among these case studies to reach larger conclusions. First and foremost, the study addresses the question of why Appalachian economic development failed to reach its full potential despite the region's rich natural resources. Along the way, Glass Towns addresses issues of ethnicity, industrial relations, and political culture. |
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Ethnicity enters the picture because most skilled glassworkers were immigrants. The cultures they brought with them, rooted in craft traditions, shaped their workplace as well as the communities they formed in West Virginia. "Skilled glassworkers ... blended ethnic and craft subcultures to create a transnational occupational identity," Fones-Wolf explains. "This identity transcended the particular ethnic group, as plants mixed skilled immigrant glassworkers from England, Germany, France, and Belgium." Such interethnic solidarity did not extend to workers who filled the ranks of the semiskilled and unskilled. It was "an exclusive identity, intent on protecting craft prerogatives and potentially passing them on to sons" (p. 50). |
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Fones-Wolf provides a fascinating discussion of the ethnic division of labor in early-twentieth-century West Virginia glass plants—with northern European immigrants on top, native whites occupying semiskilled positions, and Italians and African Americans on the lower rungs. He relates the little-known story of the Belgian glass cooperatives that flourished during the formative years of the state's glass industry, enabling the town of Clarksburg to become "a craftsman's paradise" (p. 113). Of course, mechanization changed all that as skilled jobs gave way to semiskilled and unskilled jobs, made small shops less competitive, and altered relations between workers and employers. A major theme of the book is how the industry was shaped by the reaction of industrialists, workers, politicians, and civic leaders to technological innovations in glassmaking. |
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Ultimately, however, external forces played a critical role in determining the glass industry's role in the regional economy. The key factor—which will come as no surprise to students of Appalachian history—was the overwhelming power of the coal industry to dictate industrial relations and politics in West Virginia. The political struggle between proponents of "value-added" development (who wanted to improve the local infrastructure to make the state attractive to manufacturers) and proponents of resource extraction (who wanted a low-tax, low-wage economy in order to compete in the national coal market) was, in the end, one-sided. Despite the success of the state's glass industry and the lively "glass towns" that grew up around plants in Moundsville, Fairmont, and Clarksburg, manufacturers had only second-class status, and their lack of political power limited their ability to transform the state's economy. |
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Glass Towns offers a fine example of how a local study can be both regional and international in scope. By exploring the promise of the glass industry, revealing its transnational dimensions, and describing how it changed the towns where it held sway, Fones-Wolf makes a valuable contribution to Appalachian, ethnic, and labor history.
Deborah R. Weiner
Jewish Museum of Maryland
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