The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal

It can be argued that no technology has liberated the world from the drudgery and cold of pre-modern times more than coal. It contributed to the Industrial Revolution and rising standards of living that changed what human life meant after 1800. The price of this freedom soon meant the massacre of workers, rising carbon dioxide levels and the threat of planetary environmental catastrophe.

Today, perhaps no technology dooms the world's future more than coal, with its environmental destruction, carbon dioxide emissions into the air and hazardous working conditions that are still killing people today through work, pollution and climate change. Environmental journalist Robert Wyss offers readers an often dramatic episodic look at coal in American history, a great paradox between power and destruction that we could avoid today, but we choose not to because of vested corporate interests and Donald Trump's nostalgia for an America where coal was burned in abundance and white men like him ruled the world.

A cheap and abundant source of energy that could power factories anywhere provided enormous financial benefits, and coal revolutionized the world economy. The first factories relied on hydroelectric power, clean in terms of then-unknown carbon dioxide emissions, but limited development to waterways. Coal changed the geography of industrialization, allowing huge industrial operations to take place wherever the capitalist wanted to build. This fueled the steel industry and railroads. It heated houses – dirty, but in a 19th century working class home, avoiding the cold took precedence over smoke for most families. The idea that fossil fuels improve living standards is at the core of the ideology of many of Trump's energy advisers, who, not coincidentally, often have financial interests in the industry. They ignore or lie about the enormous human and environmental costs.

As Wyss repeatedly reminds readers, the horrors of coal emerged quickly. An entrepreneur could easily dig a hole in the ground and find workers to dig up coal. Shortly after 1800, mines began delivering coal to eastern cities. In an era of no regulations, when courts routinely ruled that employers owed workers nothing if they died or were injured on the job because no one forced them to do that particular job, workers soon began dying from cave-ins, gas explosions, and employers' indifference to their lives. Wyss juxtaposes the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876, which celebrated America's coal-fueled industrial might with workers spending days without seeing daylight, racial tension in the mines when companies used black strikebreakers, and accidental deaths.

Not surprisingly, workers began to organize. The nation's most notorious labor organization, the Molly Maguires, was the first response to the terrible conditions in Pennsylvania mines that had become associated with terrorism. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick would stop at nothing to keep their coal-fired steel mills together, and this allows Wyss to tell the story of Pinkerton's invasion of Homestead, Pennsylvania, during the famous 1892 Carnegie Steel strike. The United Mine Workers formed in 1890 and became a more respectable form of trade unionism. But over time, the UMWA became part of the machine that kept the nation in bondage to coal. Legendary UMWA President John L. Lewis fought tooth and nail for his people, as Wyss explores with attention to detail in the labor and driving safety strikes, but he was also a tyrant and a man who believed himself and his union were more powerful at the center of America's future than they actually turned out to be.

Coal also blackened the collective lungs of the nation, both inside the mines and outside, where coal smoke blotted out the sun. Wyss tells the story of early 20th-century efforts to rid the country's polluted urban air of coal smoke. This process is often led by women who have found political space to pursue urban reforms based on gender stereotypes around motherhood, framed by protecting their children from polluting industries. They struggled to succeed in a world dominated by the ideology of endless industrial growth. Finally, in the 1970s, environmental movements began to tame coal. Wyss tells this story by focusing on the Navajo Power Plant in Arizona. As always, coal divided Americans, in this case the Navajo, on whose land the power plant was located and on whom tribal leaders relied for scarce financial resources.

Wyss convincingly describes how coal still destroys life and landscapes. He tells powerful stories of miners dying of black lung, mountaintop mining changing the geology of Kentucky and West Virginia, waste flowing into river beds, and the devastating floods that result. Wyss sees coal slowly disappearing from the American landscape. The Navajo Power Plant blew up in 2020, and the arrival of reliable clean energy should put an end to coal consumption. But will it be too late for people to change course on climate change?

Wyss actually leaves out much of the history of the coal industry, including the landmark labor battles for control of the mines. He could have easily doubled the length of the book, telling dramatic and often violent stories. Some would have strengthened the book. Take the history of coal in Colorado. Wyss does not mention the Ludlow Massacre, when workers at a Rockefeller-owned mine went on strike and Colorado National Guard and company guards opened fire on the camp in 1914, killing more than a dozen women and children camped in the tent city. What followed was weeks of war that may have killed 200 people and that historian Thomas Andrews, in his book, called the deadliest strike in American history. Killing for Coal. The violence led the U.S. Labor Relations Commission to prosecute John D. Rockefeller Jr. for embarrassing public testimony about his indifference to working conditions in his mines. And then, when the Industrial Workers of the World struck at the Columbine mine in that state in 1927, its young owner Josephine Roche was so frightened by the conditions at the mine that she had inherited from her father that she invited the United Mine Workers to organize their workers into a union, later became the union's top official in the New Deal, and finally managed the UMWA pension fund for more than 20 years. So yes, the history of coal is quite dramatic.

But I don't blame Wyss for missing out on these stories. Coal plays such a dominant role in American history, so overwhelming in its negative impact on workers and the environment, that any author has to make difficult choices to avoid either a thousand-page doorway or a boring fact book. Instead, he takes the jokes he has chosen and writes them with great force and energy.

Wyss wrote this book before Donald Trump returned to the presidency, but Trump's energy policies revolve around nostalgia for burning fossil fuels. The administration has shuttered wind and solar projects across the country, including the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, an 80 percent completed project that employed more than 1,000 union workers. Presumably, this is the kind of work Trump wants to bring back to the United States. This has great appeal in the coal regions of America. Despite the horrors that Wyss so accurately describes, coal provided the best jobs that have ever existed in these parts of America.

Democrats have failed as much as Republicans in articulating and implementing alternative economic models for coal country, and until they step up their game, Trumpist nostalgia for coal will likely continue to shape the politics of much of America, despite all the horrors that Wyss so convincingly describes. So when he wonders whether America can move away from coal before it's too late, the answer may well be no, and for the worst possible reasons. But be that as it may, the only thing at stake here is the future of humanity and most species of the planet. What is this compared to good old liberalism-hating fossil fuel burning?