contemporary debates about energy politics and the transition away from fossil fuels depart from a basic assumption that congress makes the law and that energy producing communities must learn how to live with it. in this panel, we propose an alternative way of examining modern energy policy and politics in the united states. our research looks at appalachia not only as a key target of modern energy policy, but rather as a region whose politics broadly conceived have shaped the possibilities and priorities for energy politics on the national stage since the new deal. together these papers offer an appalachia out perspective on modern us energy policy emphasizing the region's importance while pushing back against simplistic regional portrayals that often circulate in national discourse and especially at election time. appalachia we argue has not just been a target for policy, but instead a wide range of actors from workers and ordinary residents to colberts to state party leaders have powerfully shaped the possibilities for the trajectory of the nation's nrc policy from a contested and often misunderstood region. now before we dive in today, i want to take a moment to introduce all of the panelists at once and so i'll just sort of work our way through in the order that will be presenting. william helgorby is a teaching associate professor at west virginia university. he is the 2020 to 2021 recipient. eberly colleges outstanding teacher award and the university's nicholas evans excellence and advising award his book wheeling's polonia reconstructing polish community in a west virginia steel town was published by west virginia university pressed in may 2020. he is also consulted on the research and script editing for the pbs american experience documentary the mine wars and in 2019. he researched to vote and hosted a podcast by wheeling heritage media titled henry the life and times of wheeling's most notorious brewer which won a history hero award from the west virginia department of arts culture and history in 2020. alan dear trick award is professor of history at shippensburg university. he is the author of beyond rust metropolitan pittsburgh and the fate of industrial america winner of the 2016 arlene custer award for the best book on mid-atlantic history, and he is currently working on an environmental history survey of pennsylvania to be published in 2023 by temple university press sylvia ryerson is phd candidate in american studies at yale university prior to graduate school. she worked at the apple shop media arts and education center in whitesburg, kentucky where she co-directed apple shops and wmmt's making connections news a multimedia storytelling project documenting efforts for adjust transition from coal extraction and calls from home a weekly radio program broadcasting music and toll-free phone messages from family members to their loved ones incarcerated in appalachia. so like i've just brought said broadly we're gonna go in chronological order. that means myself how alan and then sylvia. bleach speak for about 15 minutes leaving plenty of time for questions and discussion at the end. and then finally, i just want to take a brief moment to the conference organizers for all their work to make this panel possible to c-span for helping us bring our research to the broader public and to two of our panel members who unfortunately could not be with us sarah phillips and lloyd tomlinson, and we really wish they could have been here for this discussion, but we at least want to acknowledge their contributions to preparing for it. so again, we're looking forward to an urgent lively discussion with that all shipped over to my own research. so on april 29th, 1943 400 coal miners gathered for a union meeting in cooperstown, west virginia to make a consequential decision whether or not they would strike in the middle of the second world war in defiance of president roosevelt. they're gathering was not unique. locals across the country were holding similar meetings and when they had finished deliberating they sent two telegrams one to roosevelt the president of their country. and one to john l lewis the president of their union the united mine workers of america are umw they would indeed strike just a few days later on may 2nd miners once again gathered this time. they just discussed how to respond to the truths which had been declared between roosevelt and lewis and glitzen pennsylvania striking miners voted unanimously to return to work because they were quote americans first last and all the time and they did not want to threaten stockpiles of coal with a sustained strike. now typically we have placed these stories as part of a broader wartime labor history and they certainly belong there, but i also want to suggest that they have something to tell us about how the second world war changed the way americans governed energy. the story of that changes partly about the expansion expansion of state capacity and authority. but it is also a story about the role of ordinary people in shaping the state's ability to govern and it can illustrate to us what i've come to call a high-energy social contract that braided together people's energetic and political lives. so, let me take a minute to talk about how this story is currently situated in our understanding of modern us history. in all accounts of labor during the war the united mine workers john l lewis and coal miners figure prominently. throughout 1943 one of the most consequential years of the war. the nation's miners were in a militant mood. they struck repeatedly demanding higher wages drawing down coal stockpiles to dangerous levels and perhaps most memorably of all drawing the nation's ire. the federal government seized ownership of the mines for several months, but ultimately the miners won. the more attention went to the union's president donald. now nelson-lichtenstein and his landmark study labor's war at home called this the epic battle of lewis's career david kennedy and his touchstone touchstone oxford history of the period. credits lewis and the umw so-called pure victory in the dispute with the turning of the public tide against labor in the war allowing conservatives quote to take their revenge for nearly a decades worth of labor gains. jim sparrow explains how the same process played out among everyday americans quote a bridge was crossed that left late organized labor politically isolated and partially discredited as a full partner in the war effort. the recognize importance of these events seems deeply out of step with the depth of narration which they have been accorded. however given the nearly universal acknowledgment of the importance of the united mine workers in shaping the politics of wartime labor. we strangely know very little about the way the conflicts actually unfolded on the ground their implications for the wartime energy system and minor zone thoughts about them. all accounts acknowledge that in 1943 the dispute centered around minors demands for a wage increase as wartime inflation hit miners particularly hard. and as the standard story goes miners got their wage increase, but they're open and repeated defiance of the no strike pledge shifted the balance of power in the nation's industrial relations because it gave conservatives conservatives. and opening to hammer through the war labor disputes act better known as the smith connelly act. but by any measure, this is a quite narrow accountant. so my focus here is actually going to be to try and transform that and i actually think i've identified why there is such narranous because every footnote that i've been able to find that goes back to source these sort of accounts goes back to melvin dubovsky's and warren been times biography of john l lewis published originally in 1977 in an abridged version in 1986 where the chapter on the strikes of 1943 is reduced to 20 pages and this certainly helps to also explain the focus on lewis who without a doubt did play a central role in how the dispute unfolded but it also means that the biographical concerns of duboxy and ben time have played an outsized role in directing our gaze and focus. and so this narrow understanding is more than a strange laguna in us history or in labor history, but instead it alerts us to a series of underlying conflicts about the way the united states organized the wartime energy system and critically protracted and consequential debates. about the authority for making decisions about energy. so i can turn that by revisiting this history by focusing on labor energy and governance helps us to better understand the state transformation during the war. so to develop a wider understanding of this conflict i want to work from miners demands backward to understand the meaning that minors their union politicians and the nation attached to them. so we'll start with the basic question when are wages more than wages. well a labor historian would tell you they're always more than that, but on the eve of the second world war the us energy system was stabilized by stabilizing prices and wages in the coal fields through a dual system of collective bargaining and the bituminous coal conservation act better known as the guppy colact. you're gonna hear me refer to this sort of dual system as the guffy system and so while i don't have the time sort of fully detailed the mechanisms by which this system operated i want to highlight in here the i've highlighted here the preamble to the original act passed in 1935, which gives us a window into the problems the guffy act intended to solve even if ultimately this little nra was narrowed to the setting of minimum prices for coal through a series of legal decisions the gupp. critically also operated on a two-year renewal cycle. and so the act always expired in concert with the united mine workers, but humanist wage conference. and so these two levers on the nation's energy system, which was predominantly coal fired at this point operated together and everyone involved understood that so but thanks to the legal quagmire into which the little nra entered that system was very little tested by the time us war mobilization entered its most frenetic phases war upended the american energy system. now the most obvious reason for this is the enormous energetic demands of military logistics production and warmaking what would be referred to in documents as the so-called prosecution of the war effort. gasoline was first to be rational than fuel oil and us warpl planners look to coal to not only produce steel but also to free up other fuels for war provisions. so americans were encouraged to convert back to coal burning stoves and heaters and many did you can find accounts of people pulling up old cold stoves from basements and out of sheds and madison square garden made quite a show of their conversion back to anthracite coal to heat madison square garden. but there were other less obvious pressures first the geography of domestic consumption changed as people moved for war jobs. so the set the us energy system is set up to get particular forms of energy to particular places that particular times suddenly everybody moves and that system is suddenly not set up to deliver the energy where it needs to be now once they arrive the booming economy and higher wages left them according to the solid fuels deputated administrator harold gray less willing to shiver bundle up and share beds. and so it wasn't just that enough net energy had to be produced but that it had to be made available in the right quantities in the right place at the right time and in a form that people were actually able to use now whether or not the guffey system could have managed this we will never know the expansion of state authority through new laws and wartime administrations had already introduced overlapping change of authority into the nations energy system by the time war was declared in 1941. expanding authority it would soon become clear was not the same thing as unifying it. so a series of questions student presented themselves which institutions could credibly exert legitimate authority over which aspects of the nation's energy system. what were the boundaries of authority in a complex multi-fuel system where? the amount of coal used in one place depended on the amount of gas used in another. what happened when the mechanisms for labor energy and economic administration overlapped with or even contradicted each other in the first two years of the war since the 1941 agreement and the extension of the guffy act. these questions had only become more pointed as the energy demands grew more intense. the federal government had become substantially more complex and well, i don't have time here to delve deeply into each point. i'm happy to speak more about all of these in the q&a but most basically war time federal authority overlapped with previously established authority from the coffee system in three places one was in prices and wages, which i sort of is being together because that's how the guppy system imagined them. the others were working conditions and then issues of management and negotiation. so i'm going to walk through here very quickly what that looked like from the top down and then what it meant from the bottom up. one of the key mechanisms of the guppy system operated around pricing wage stabilization, but the office of price administration quickly overlap this authority and became a deep point of conflict very early on in the war. and you can see here on one side that the united mind workers were deeply concerned about the opa and it was quite hated in cold communities because they felt they were targeted especially for high prices compared to the rest of the country. in working conditions in 1941. there was a federal mind safety act. that was a desperately needed intervention despite reform efforts dating back to the progressive era and despite the fact that mine explosions the most visible of dangers to people who weren't minors, right? they these were relatively easy and cheap to prevent and yet they continued and so public law 7749 finally passed in 1941 after years of debate finally did grant miners or sorry grant federal inspectors the right to enter mines, but do little more than issue reports, right? so this didn't really have a lot of teeth but as people at the time recognized this authority had basically our was already doubled right it already should have existed in theory in the guppy system. but it instead it entered a new separate chain of authority for decision making for evaluating whether or not mines were safe and by the end of the war miners would also have safety committees, right which would just add further. bubbles of complication to this now in terms of management negotiation, this is probably the place where things got muddiest so you had the guffy act which was supposed to sort of allow prices and wages to sort of be set in concert you had the actual negotiations between the operators and the miners and the bituminous wage conference. you had the national war labor board, which was supposed to settle disputes in the infamous little steel settlement which sort of had basic minor spell had shot them out of the negotiation process and that that was supposed to be the war time mechanism by which these disputes were mediated and then in 1943, you actually get the solid fuels administration for the war which roosevelt actually directly decides to give out in april 1943 with the idea that it will prevent a strike. it doesn't do that, but it's really seen as sort of being a replacement for the guppy system which by 1943 is really clear is just not working anymore. and so all of these in theory are supposed to be dealing with things related to keeping workers on the job right to actually keeping people in their workplaces and but they all operate by different sort of chains of authority through the federal government through the union through the wage conference and use it different mechanisms by which they decide sort of how those disputes are going to be resolved and notably again miners really feels that they've been shut out of this process. now from the bottom up, i think these are the similar they're similar issues similar problems of overlapping authority, but i think the stakes of them are a little bit different right because you have people who are working in the nation's most dangerous workplace harold exit one point actually states that the minds are more dangerous than combat, which i think like they're excused about whether or not that's actually true but it is at the level of comparison and certainly he believes that in the miners take him up on it. but if we look here we can see a little bit of the way that miners sort of narrated the both the issue of sort of moving from the guppy system into the little steel settlement and also by saying that you know issues of wages are really about the bigger questions of justice. they also felt they've been disproportionately targeted by inflation, right? so where it was true that generally workers wages during the war exceeded inflation. this was generally not true in mining towns particularly in places where there were still company stores and you also had a lot of minors who, you know their children were working in war plants and they saw them getting much higher wages. and this was enraging after all that miners had suffered and sacrificed for the war. issues of safety we're also quite pointed and here again, you see more of those echoes of comparing the mining front to the war but during the the years of the war there were over 60,000 injuries a year more than a thousand deaths and these were astronomical figures in a workforce of about 400,000 people. and then finally because of a longer history of seeing their citizenship as broadly tied to coal, which is really what my book project is about miners. really associated very deeply negotiation is not just about wages and working conditions, but really is about the basic components of democratic citizenship. and so here we see a few ways that minors and their families narrated these things one here the top from this emphasite striker actually learned that his son had been killed in action in the pacific while the reporter was interviewing him. and so you say here he says dickey was fighting for one thing. i'm fighting for another and they ain't so far apart james edward says miners are fighting for their freedom at home while american armies fight the same battle on foreign soil and then mildred. robnett said we don't want strikes, but we're not slaves. we're supposed to be free and when we put this in the broader context of company authoritarianism dating back half a century, we can see here that when richard deborah goes and is actually sent. x to figure out what the hell is going on? he says these people are deeply identified with the war. they see themselves as fighting for democracy. but at the end of the day they if we brought the army home right now, they would set them on the operators and you're not going to resolve this basically by forcing people back into the minds and that's where we get that sort of apocal story. you can't mind coal with bayonets and so all of these things i'm happy to discuss more but for me, this is really presents a problem for the way that we've narrated these strikes and so my hope is that we can see this more broadly as being about how minor saw themselves participating in a wartime energy system and not just as sort of a part of a broader battle within between lewis the cio and the roosevelt administration. so thank you so much and we'll move on to our next speaker and these are some questions that i'd be happy to talk more about in the q&a. good morning, everybody. when you think of coal you think of west virginia? and maybe as a native west