The Americanization of West Virginia: Creating a Modern Industrial State, 1916-1925

Local teachers and ministers extolling the virtues of hard work and loyalty to God and country. Veterans\u27 groups and women\u27s clubs promoting the military fighting radicalism, and equating business and patriotism. Industrial leaders gaining legal as well as moral influence over national domestic policy. Such scenes might seem to be lifted from a Sinclair Lewis novel or a Contract with America publicity video. But as John C. Hennen shows in this piercing analysis of early-twentieth-century American political culture, from 1916 to 1925 Americanization became the theme—indeed, the script—not only of West Virginia but of the entire nation. Hennen\u27s interdisciplinary work examines a formative period in West Virginia\u27s modern history that has been largely neglected beyond the traditional focus on the coal industry. Hennen looks at education, reform, and industrial relations in the state in the context of war mobilization, postwar instability, and national economic expansion. The First World War, he says, consolidated the dominant positions of professionals, business people, and political capitalists as arbiters of national values. These leaders emerged from the war determined to make free-market business principles synonymous with patriotic citizenship. Americanization, therefore, refers less to the assimilation of immigrants into the national mainstream than to the attempt to encode values that would guarantee a literate, loyal, and obedient producing class. To ensure that the state fulfilled its designated role as a resource zone for the perceived greater good of national strength, corporate leaders employed public relations tactics that the Wilson administration had refined to gain public support for the war. Alarmed by widespread labor activism and threatened by fears of communism, the American Constitutional Association in West Virginia, one of dozens of similar organizations nationwide, articulated principles that identified the well-being of business with the well-being of the country. With easy access to teacher training and classroom programs, antiunion forces had by 1923 rolled back the wartime gains of the United Mine Workers of America. Middle-class voluntary organizations like the American Legion and the West Virginia Federation of Women\u27s Clubs helped implant mandated loyalty in schoolchildren. Far from being isolated during America\u27s transformation into a world power, West Virginia was squarely in the mainstream. The state\u27s people and natural resources were manipulated into serving crucial functions as producers and fuel for the postwar economy. Hennen\u27s study, therefore, is a study less of the power or force of ideas than of the importance of access to the means to transmit ideas. The winner of the1995 Appalachian Studies Award is a significant contribution to regional studies as well as to our understanding of American culture during and after World War I. John C. Hennen earned his doctorate at West Virginia University and is currently a visiting instructor of history at the University of Kentucky.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/1118/thumbnail.jp

Deficient Induction Response in a Xenopus Nucleocytoplasmic Hybrid

Defects in induction signaling and response underlie the nucleocytoplasmic incompatibility between two evolutionarily distant frog species, while specific treatments partially restore this response in explants and whole embryos

Local 1199 at Clinch Valley: Justice Unionism in a Right-to-Work State, 1972-1974

By 1969 Local 1199, a union representing health care workers, had begun to organize beyond its base in New York City. The union, represented by West Virginia-born organizer Larry Harless, won a few victories in small private hospitals in West Virginia in the early 1970s. Local 1199 commanded wide attention in Appalachia in 1973 with a campaign at the Clinch Valley Clinic Hospital, a private facility in Richlands, Virginia, owned by Bluefield Sanitarium, Inc. Pro-union Clinch Valley service and maintenance workers faced heavy odds. Virginia had been a Right-to-Work state since 1947, meaning that “union security” agreements such as automatic dues checkoffs from workers covered by a union contract were illegal. Moreover, there was a possibility that the workers would be chastised for pushing traditional gendered boundaries of women working in “helping” occupations. Failing for five months to secure voluntary recognition from the hospital, over 85% of Clinch Valley employees struck early in 1973. In February 140 workers, mostly women, were arrested for violating a picketing injunction. Their jailing mobilized public opinion in their favor and prompted five thousand local UMWA miners to stage a one-day sympathy walkout. Unable to control the public’s perception of the strike, the hospital finally signed a one-year contract recognizing 1199. Hospital management immediately began a new campaign to undermine the contract, and successfully “decertified” the union (by one vote) when the contract expired in 1974. This paper addresses three themes: the expansion of the civil rights and social justice foundations of an urban-based service workers\u27 union into an Appalachian context; the mobilization of union and anti-union sentiment in Tazewell County; and American labor law since 1970. The paper will rely on Tazewell County Circuit Court documents, contemporary newspaper and periodical reporting, oral history, and secondary works on working-class issues in the 1970s. The presentation will include a few slides. Topics: Appalachian labor history; labor law; democratic unionis

Putting the You in Union

In early August 1975, Jo Ann Martin, a licensed practical nurse at Highlands Regional Medical Center in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, received a letter and a couple of leaflets from New York City, set- ting in motion a sequence of events that changed the lives of her and her co-workers at the hospital forever. The material came from Robert L. Muehlenkamp, assistant director of organization for Local 1199, the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. Muehlenkamp informed Martin that tens of thousands of hospital workers in twenty-two states, capitalizing on 1974 legislation that extended federal labor law protections to hospital employees, had joined 11 99 in the past year. Membership was open to all non-supervisory hospital employees. He encouraged Martin to talk to employees in the different departments of the hospital, and contact him if the workers at Highlands Regional were interested in organizing (Muehlenkamp 1975)

Union Avoidance: The language and practice of Right-to-Work campaigns in Appalachia

This panel will present the history and application of Right-to-Work campaigns in the Appalachian region, and submit a qualitative evaluation of the effects of Right-to-Work on working-class communities following the national \u27Great U Turn\u27 of the 1970s and 1980s. Those decades featured increasingly sophisticated and professionalized political and corporate initiatives to contain and roll back organized labor in the region. Southern states----including Tennessee----adopted Right-to-Work measures following the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Employing the language of deeply embedded American cultural values of independence, self-determination, and individualism to discredit even the idea of organized labor. Effectively eliminating contractual union security protections, Right-to-Work laws swiftly expanded in the Old South and the emerging Southwest, where the remnants of institutional legal segregation joined forces with political capitalists in corporations and state legislatures. Such laws have recently been adopted in previous union strongholds such as Michigan and Indiana. Right-to-Work was therefore an essential component of the broader business and political assault on unions, contributing significantly to the erosion of purchasing power, stagnation of wages, and economic security for millions of poor and working-class citizens. The structural redistribution of wealth upwards, and the unchecked concentration of income and wealth and economic opportunity in the Appalachian region, was dramatically catalyzed by the destruction of private sector organized labor. Our panelists will explain and offer recommendations, as well as soliciting lively debate, on this issue. Panelists: Anita Puckett, Virginia Tech Lou Martin, Chatham University John Hennen, Morehead State University Submitter: John Hennen is a professor of labor and working-class studies and Appalachian history at Morehead State University

Sex in the City: Breeding Behavior of Urban Peregrine Falcons in the Midwestern US

<div><p>Peregrine falcons (<i>Falco peregrinus</i>) were extirpated from most of the continental United States by widespread use of the pesticide DDT in the 1960s. Populations have rebounded with banning of the pesticide and successful implementation of captive breeding and hacking programs. An essentially new population of Midwestern peregrines now exists that is comprised almost entirely of urban-nesting birds. The new population is considered to be of mixed ancestry, occurs at relatively high densities, and has nest sites in close proximity, factors that could influence breeding behaviors including mate fidelity, nest-site fidelity, extra-pair paternity, and natal dispersal. We investigated these behaviors using a combination of field observations and DNA microsatellite genotyping. Data for eleven microsatellite DNA markers, including eight newly developed for the species, were analyzed from a total of 350 birds from nine Midwestern cities, representing 149 broods collected at 20 nest sites. To document breeding behavior, parentage was inferred by likelihood techniques when both parents were sampled and by parental genotype reconstruction when only one parent was sampled. In cases where neither parent was sampled, a sibship reconstruction approach was used. We found high mate fidelity and nest-site fidelity in urban peregrines; in 122 nesting attempts made by long-term breeders, only 12 (9.8%) mate changes and six (4.9%) nest-site changes occurred. Only one brood (of 35 tested) revealed extra-pair paternity and involved a male tending two offspring of a recently acquired mate. Natal dispersal patterns indicated that female peregrines dispersed on average 226 km, almost twice the distance of males (average 124 km). Despite the novel environment of cities, our results suggest that monogamous breeding, nest fidelity, and female natal dispersal are high in urban peregrines, not unlike other raptors living in non-urban habitats.</p></div

Reproductive output, nest site fidelity and mate fidelity from six nest sites (Chicago, IL) with long-term observation data confirmed by genetic analyses.

<p>Numbers in parentheses indicate offspring not available for genotyping.</p

Summary statistics for 11 microsatellite loci from 350 genotyped peregrine falcons.

<p>Number of alleles (<i>k</i>), observed heterozygosity (<i>H</i>_O), expected heterozygosity (<i>H</i>_E), Hardy Weinberg (HW).</p

Cities, nest sites, samples, and brood composition of Midwest peregrines analyzed in this study, including both genotyped and non-genotyped individuals.

<p>Samples were collected from 1997 to 2009. Values in parentheses indicate the number of genotyped individuals in each category. Unknown chicks were those observed but not sampled and sexed. Question marks indicate some uncertainty in the number of adults present at certain nests. A total of 28 breeders were genotyped and used for allele frequencies and summary statistics calculations.</p