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Bob Wyss, "Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal" (University of California Press, 2025)
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Bob Wiss
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Bob Wiss about his book titled Black the Rise, Rain and Fall of American Coal, published by the University of California Press in 2025. As the title suggests, we're going to be going through literal highs and literal lows below ground even to talk about American coal. That was a massive, incredibly dominant part of American everything. Politics, economics, culture, environment. And yet today is very much not the big thing that it used to be. So we've got a whole arc to go through here. Bob, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Bob Wiss
Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Likewise. Could you please start us off by Introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
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Bob Wiss
Sure. I am a longtime environmental journalist, both in newspaper coverage and later as a university professor. And more than a decade ago, I somehow had heard about a newspaper campaign that had occurred years before in St. Louis that had to do with an environmental issue. And I was led to believe that they won the Pulitzer Prize for whatever the investigation was. And it was the first time the highest journalism award in America had been given for an environmental subject. So I started looking into it and it was based in St. Louis and, and St. Louis had had a problem, as many other cities had. I would discover where during the winter everybody burned coal to keep warm. And the emissions would be so bad, particularly in places like low river valleys and things like that, that the air pollution was just terrible. And nothing, nobody ever seemed to be able to solve the problem. And somehow St. Louis began a campaign after a really extraordinarily bad day in which the visibility came down to zero. I think London people might recognize that. However, what happened is everybody in the community, including the newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, got on board and began a campaign which literally forced everybody to buy cleaner coal. And then it was really strongly regulated and enforced. And the amazing thing happened, the air cleared up and things were better. And it remained like that for years. So that's how it started. I really wasn't aware. I mean, I was aware of air pollution was a problem, but I never realized it was such a major problem in America. You can go back to 1804 and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had rules and regulations because the coal smoke was just so terrible. And from there I started exploring, well, why was coal so dominant? What. What was going on? And that led essentially the creation of the book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always interesting to hear where an investigation starts. And of course, that looking into what was happening in St. Louis, as you said, took you back much further in history. So can we talk about when and where we really see the origins of the US coal industry and what its early years were like?
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Bob Wiss
Sure. So, interestingly, originally British coal was used. Americans didn't even mine coal or very little in the colonial period and through the American Revolution. However, they started to have a problem in the War of 1812 because Britain was suddenly the enemy. And coal, which had been coming in literally as ballast at the bottom of the. Of British ships, was no longer available. So it opened up opportunities for the few coal mine operators that were there. One of them was named Charles Sist, and he tried to sell the coal, but he had what was called anthracites Coalition and anthro. There's bituminous and anthracite. And anthracite is by far the best coal to have. It's a very hard coal. It burns really well. But there's one problem. It's really hard to get it to ignite unless you know what you're doing. And so he struggled for quite a while on trying to convince people to burn his coal, but he eventually succeeded. And that really is the origins of how the coal industry developed and the market developed, Although really it would be railroads and steel and places like that which would need it even more than consumers in the homes would need it. But it was that combination of circumstances which really were the very early origins of the American coal industry.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think the relationship between coal and railroads is probably pretty well known, at least as a connection. And we'll talk about it a bit more, I'm sure, in a few moments. But before we get to that point, why do you think this early history isn't as well known?
- [07:32]
Bob Wiss
It's a good question. I'm not quite sure why it was. I think it has to do with the fact that coal was sort of taken for granted. You know, coal was in literally everybody's home. Today, coal is in nobody's home, and we don't think of it at all anymore. And I think it was just that combination of things that have kind of left it discarded. You know, there are things in history that just get so much dust that they get forgotten. And I don't think people really looked into it very much.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, fair enough. Taken for granted. Can definitely have that effect. Moving then, to discussing railroads. As I said, they are kind of quite often put together, but I think maybe we usually put kind of the railroad as being the important thing and coal being necessary to make that happen. From your book, though, there was very much the sense that kind of the railroads came about because of coal. So can you help us understand that relationship?
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Bob Wiss
Yeah, well, so coal. Coal was needed, particularly in the cities, okay. In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore. But the coal wasn't located in the cities. The coal was located often in very remote areas of the early America. So the few coal operators and miners had difficulty getting coal to the market. Originally, they tried the canal system, and the canal system flourished for a number of years, but it always had a problem because we had winter in America, and so you couldn't really operate barges on ice. So railroad was starting to develop in the 1830s and 1840s, and it soon became the clear way to do it. And it's really almost a chicken egg sort of situation to figure out what really came first, the railroads or the coal mines in the coal industry. Because essentially coal needed the railroads to ship, but the railroads need the coal to power the locomotives to get the coal out there. And then eventually, as the steel industry developed, coal was needed to also create the railroads, the railroad lines and the tracks to be able to propel. Because the wooden tracks, they tried wooden tracks at the beginning and they just didn't work. They only lasted for five or 10 years. And on top of it you had things like mountains to go over. And so you had to have more and more powerful locomotives to be able to do that. So it's this combination of events of coal, railroads and steel kind of came together in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and then particularly post World war, post Civil War, it really, really took off. And you will find companies out there. And I had a long list of them in one of the chapters where you literally find not, not the name of just the railroad company, but it's tied to a coal company or it's tied to a steel company or they're tied. All three of those particular commodities are tied together.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. The symbiotic relationship here is really quite key. But of course the expansion of these industries doesn't sort of happen magically itself with the sort of railroads pushing themselves and the coal mining itself. There's people involved in this. In fact, as you're suggesting, quite a lot of people are involved to make these industries as big as they are. If we are talking about the sort of later 1800s, why were these industries of coal mines, steel manufacturing, railroads, sites of such high tension and violence compared to other aspects of the economy?
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Bob Wiss
Well, I think the late 19th century and even into the early 20th century was an incredible time of labor violence. It's just extraordinary in America how things could not come together. Part of it has to do with the unions. Well, it's really hard to figure out just where it started. I mean, if you look at the coal industry, the coal industry was a terribly, terribly dangerous field to work in. And the pay wasn't all that good. Nobody would work in it except eventually immigrants. And first it was the Irish and then it was Eastern European and to a certain extent in the south. It was former people who were enslaved and they were exploited. They were exploited to a tremendous, tremendous extent. There were attempts by unions to protect the workers. But if we look at something like the period when the so called Molly McGuires were around, which was around 1875, 1876, this was a Irish fraternal organization which became a union. And when they tried to negotiate with the owners, which included not only the coal owners, but the railroads, which owned many of the coal companies, they didn't get very far. And one thing would lead to another. And the first evidence of violence shows up in the Molly McGuires and the forces, the industrial forces reacted strongly against the unions and the Irish workers. And there were massive amounts of prosecutions, there were executions, and it pretty much crippled the industry entirely. And you will continue to find that as the decades go on. And it would carry over to areas like railroads, it would carry over to steel, it eventually carried over to textiles and things like that. And it wouldn't start to change until sometime in the 20th century.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's very intense indeed. And obviously, as you've mentioned, poor economic conditions, the exploitation of the employers is a key factor in this. But how much were race and religion also part of why there was tension and violence?
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Bob Wiss
It was absolutely part of the tension. The Irish workers were almost all Catholic. Catholics were. I guess the word would be scorned. They would be discriminated against people. It was a Protestant nation in America. And interestingly, there's evidence that the Irish did not like the blacks, the few who were up in the North. And so we find the prejudice there, you would find that would continue, particularly in the south before the Civil War. Most of the workers who were coal miners in the south before the Civil War were enslaved after the Civil War. They would use slave labor, essentially, where they would find everybody was free, obviously at that time. But they would convict them and then they would sell them. The governments would sell them to the coal mine industries. And almost everybody in the mines was black. In the south, in the. I would say the period between 1860 in 1900 in the north, black coal miners were only mostly used as stabs, as people who were brought in during a strike as replacement workers. So, yeah, you can see the prejudice in it. It extends all the way through. We can move into the 20th century and go to places like Colorado and Ludlow, Colorado, where there was a terrible, terrible violence that occurred around 1914, where women and children were caught in the crossfires and were killed. There was guerrilla warfare. A lot of these people were. Were again, Eastern European or they were Spanish speaking, or sometimes they were. They were Asians and they were always the most exploited and obviously the most abused.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those do not sound like conditions for economic success. And yet these coal and steel companies become a massive part a Dominant part of the US Economy and the world economy, too. How did that happen?
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Bob Wiss
You know, I think the US Had a clear advantage over places like Europe. In that particular time, industry was developing, particularly in Europe and particularly in portions of North America. But in North America, you had vast resources here. I mean, we have more coal here. I mean, it's been called. The coal industry has been called the Saudi Arabia of North America. There's just tremendous, tremendous amounts of coal everywhere. I mean, I can drive around this country, and wherever you drive, you will find cities or streets or places where there used to be coal mines. It was incredibly extraordinary. I mean, while coal is considered something that's only in Appalachia or places like that, it was really, really endemic. The same thing can be said about steel. Tremendous amounts of iron ore in North America that were plentiful. And as the nation expanded and the railroads expanded, they could go to both the coal mines, they could go to the ore fields in the Great Lakes. And because of that, it really prospered. And you didn't have the political boundaries and you had the plentiful resources. And that combination really shows how the advantage America has. And I talk about the 1876 centennial that occurred in Philadelphia, which is where America really tried to show off what it was trying to do. And it's just an amazing story at that time that Americas were on the cusp of. Of really taking over from Britain. Britain had been the world leaders as far as coal and industry and the powerful nation that it was. But America was on the cusp of changing all of that. And it did.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It did have some negative effects, though, going back to what started you off on this in the first place. How bad was the pollution, given how dominant these companies were, was it just St. Louis? I mean, pretty obviously not, right?
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Bob Wiss
And to a certain extent, you know, this was probably the greatest thrust of my book. And that's why when I talk about the origins of what came from the book, it's really what drove the book from the very beginning. Because coal has always been very dirty and very dangerous. We've talked about the dangers and the hazards to the coal workers, but the dangers were also to ordinary people who lived in the communities. These cities all across America had a combination that everybody was burning. Everybody was burning coal and using it in their. To heat them, to heat their houses in the winter, to cook their food all year. And that would have consequences as far as the emissions. And then the industries were using coal also to fire the forges that were producing all the supplies. And as they grew. They became more and more powerful. Well, as they grew, they also became more and more a force of pollution. And this would happen throughout the country. You can find it mostly, as I said, in places like the low river valleys. St. Louis is one example where it's a low river valley. Pittsburgh was another one. Smaller cities like Chattanooga and places like you wouldn't even think of, like Salt Lake City, which was ringed by huge mountains, would have these problems. And in particular, from 1865 until around 1945, these things occurred. But, you know, even in places that were coastal, such as New York or Washington, they would have problems. New York in particular, because it was so big and vast and had so many sources of pollution. There were stories about how you could stand on the Battery and you could not see the Statue of Liberty. And it wasn't fog, it was pollution. It was coal smoke. There are stories about how the pollution in Washington, D.C. was so bad that the Washington Monument, the marble in the Washington Monument, was getting tinged with brown. And so why did the cities tolerate these things? Well, they didn't tolerate it. There were bands of advocates in each of these cities who would fight the pollution. And they would go to the city officials and they would urge them to. To do something to try and clamp down and get either cleaner burning coal, or later on in places like Chicago, where there were extraordinary amounts of railroad trains going through the city, forced the railroads to move from burning coal to burning electricity, which was that technology was developing by the 20th century, and they did not succeed. Why did they not succeed? There were two reasons. First of all, many of them were led by women reformers. Okay, These could be powerful society women in many places, club women, women who belong to civic clubs, women's clubs, and things like that. But. And they would be married to men who would be powerful men. But, you know, they would complain about things like how the housekeeping, how it was dirty and it smudged the houses, and they had to do the laundry more often. They had to do the curtains. And they didn't have a lot of facts except for that. And on the other side, the industry said, we need the coal. We need the industry, we need the jobs. And the other problem was that science and medicine just had not marshaled enough facts, had not done enough research to be able to document just how severe this air pollution was. Because we knew now that this air pollution was killing people. Okay? It was killing people in 1860. It was killing people in 1880. It was killing people as late as 1945. And they had some evidence of it. They had autopsies of people who'd lived for many years in urban areas where the lungs were clearly blackened and shriveled. But they couldn't prove it to an overwhelming degree, the way we now know that science and medicine are showing how terribly, terribly dangerous air pollution really is. So even when they had these campaigns, and you can go back and find campaigns in cities throughout this era, and sometimes they would succeed in getting the ordinance passed and the city would value do things, they would hire some inspectors, they would, they'd do some enforcement. Within a few years, however, they suddenly didn't have the money for it. There was just was not the political willpower to be able to follow up. And that would go on for many, many years.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And yet, as we've mentioned, right? Something does change such that we're not in that situation now. So if we fast forward a bit to kind of after World War II, what's changing at this point with the economics and geography of coal?
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Bob Wiss
Yes, several things happened. Think about World War II and the aftermath of World War II, where the American economy changed tremendously. And let's talk about transportation. Transportation, obviously in the 19th century was ruled entirely by railroads. Now we have something beginning in the 20th century called the automobile. By 1945, when all these American GIs return, they want their own car, okay? And obviously, cars are powered by gasoline. Gasoline is a derivative of oil. The oil industry, beginning in the early 20th century, begins to expand rather rapidly. After really having no place to go but with automobiles, suddenly they had this massive, massive market. And so oil, by 1945, 1946, begins to carve into the energy dynamics of America, and it begins to find more and more markets. The other thing that happens, and I guess there's two other things that happen. One is natural gas arrives. Now, there had been gas going back to the mid 19th century. It's called manufactured gas, or town gas. It was a derivative coal. Coal was producing gas, and it would light up homes, it would light up businesses, it would light the street lights and things like that. And to a certain extent, it could provide heat, but it was not really a very efficient energy Source. But after 1945, because the Petroleum industry is growing and the gas had just been vented, and now they suddenly figure out we can use this gas. And so the natural gas pipelines develop throughout America and spread. And. And the combination of those two things really has a tremendous, tremendous impact on coal. And where in 1930, if you went into a home, you'd find coal would be there by 1960, coal is gone from the American home. It's replaced by, primarily by gas, but to a certain extent, a little bit for oil. And then finally, the last thing that's changed is the unions. Labor finally begins to change, and that begins to change. You can see a little bit of it occurring in 1902 when a strike occurred. And Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, steps in and actually aids the coworkers in the strike and helps them out and gets them, like a 10% pay increase. That's. That's like the first time you see the labor unions actually having a little bit of clout. But now move over to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the depression. And one of the things he does is he essentially passes a major, major labor law to help workers to try and raise their income at a time of the great Depression. And this labor leader named John L. Lewis, who heads the United Mine Workers, takes advantage of it and starts an extraordinary campaign to sign up coal workers into the unions. And it's incredibly, incredibly successful. And suddenly, the labor unions become a powerful, powerful economic force in which they control how prices are going to handle. I mean, it's no Longer the coal owners and operators that are controlling things. The union has a series of strikes that began in the late 1930s and continue through World War II at a time when that could be considered a traitor's act. But. And they will continue until around 1950 when they will begin to lose their power slowly, slowly, slowly, as coal goes down in usage. So it's a combination of those three things that really change the American economic and industrial dynamics and leads to the major, major changes in coal. Coal doesn't end, but coal changes in nature, how it's going to be used for the next 50 years.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really massive change. What about for the people whose livelihoods were all bound up in this? I mean, in the book you describe coal towns where kind of that's the entire industry. What happened to those towns and the people that lived there as coal begins to fall?
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Bob Wiss
Well, the coal towns developed because, as I said, coal was located in isolated areas of the country. And the coal owners and operators needed employees. And the only way they could get the employees is to literally build these towns, build these communities and furnish them with housing and get them out there to these isolated areas of the country. And then they had a workhorse. And this would begin in the late 19th century and would continue until again post World War II. And an interesting thing happened with the coal towns. The operators discovered at a certain point that not only were the coal workers there to help them get the mine, to get the coal out of the mines, but essentially they had a captive audience where they could build the company store. And you really had difficulty getting to the commodities of the company store had in another community because it was just too far away. It was inconvenient. And so over time, the coal operators would jack up the prices. Eventually they discovered they were making. There would be years where they could make more money by selling commodities and renting the places and stuff like that. Their overall income from the coal towns was greater than the revenue they would make on an annual basis from selling the coal. So it was a great deal for the coal operators, not so good. However, for the people who had to live there, the housing wasn't very good. It was mostly called slum housing. The kids would go to school, but they would really need to go into the coal mines fairly early. The health system was clearly designed to help the coal operators, the doctors. Their main job was to make sure that the miners would go back into the minds as quickly as they possibly could. And one thing that's never really been totally explored and I tried to explore it a little bit in the book is just the extraordinary psychological trauma of living in a coal town. Think about this. You're the worker. Each day you're going to go into this, this pit, which is hundreds, hundreds of feet underground under terrible conditions. When an explosion, an accident, and it doesn't have to be a catastrophic thing. It can just be an individual accident with a single worker can be injured, maimed, or killed. And that's bad enough. But then think about the family, think about the wife and think about the kids. She's dependent upon this sole breadwinner in these terrible situations. And it does happen. They do get crippled, they do die, and then what are they going to do? And just the psychological terror of living under these situations just had to be extraordinary. Externally difficult. It's really never, ever, ever been covered. So why did the cold house disappear? The first opportunity when people would have to get out would change things. So after 1945, as I said, more people are going to have cars, the transportation systems going to begin. And then also the demand for coal is going to reduce. The necessity for the coal towns is reduced. And eventually, by 1960, 1970, the coal towns are the towns. The individual rentals are being sold off. The mines are closed, in many cases are closing. The whole concept of underground mining is changing to surface mining. And with transportation different, you can still go into places like West Virginia and Kentucky and find these old coal towns. But it's not run by one individual or by a company or stuff like that. It's just a relic of what it once was.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of, as you said, the aspect that doesn't get covered as much. The kind of impact of living in these sorts of communities with the pressures of going down the mine and what that means for the miners and everyone around them. Maybe we can conclude our discussion in a similar way that you conclude the book. You start and end the book talking about a specific disaster at a particular place. Why do you start and end the book with what I believe is pronounced Centralia?
- [38:41]
Bob Wiss
Centralia, Illinois. Well, I found Centralia fairly early in the research. And it was such an extraordinary story. I just couldn't let go of it. And to a certain extent, it symbolizes everything that was wrong in the mines. So Centralia was an operating coal mine. It had several hundred miners working there. And in 1947, I think it was March of 1947, they have a terrible explosion that occurs in the mine. And at first they don't know what happened, but they certainly conclude that it's A explosion that occurred. And so it becomes a huge national story where they search for days for survivors. There were only something like 15 or 20 survivors. I believe 200 people died in that accident. And so it was a situation where, again, it's interesting, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which was a very good paper, which had helped in the campaign in St. Louis, was there. And they in particular revealed while this search was still going on, that for years, an inspector for the Illinois State Inspection Office had been warning that the mine was dangerous. And the miners knew it was dangerous because it had to build up what was called coal dust. And the coal dust, which happened and still happens in mines today, although they have requirements, I'd have to abate it. Coal dust can build up just from the mining operation, and if it builds up to too big of an extent, it can actually become volatile and explode. So the mine operator warned that it had to be cleaned up, and he issued warnings, and they were totally ignored by the owners. The owners said this was a waste and they weren't going to do it. The mine inspector did not get any backup from his supervisors because his supervisors were so busy trying to raise campaign money for the governor of Illinois at the time, they were soliciting the owners of mines, including Centralia, for fundraising. So they didn't want to antagonize them, so they didn't enforce the rules. And so the bottom line is, because of these extraordinary events, the explosion occurred, there was outrage throughout the country, and there was even a nationwide strike that was done in protest of the failings that occurred. But nothing ever happened. Nothing ever happened. There were investigations. There were criminal eye investigations that occurred, government investigations that occurred. There were some very weak rules that occurred, but nothing of any extraordinary extent. And the coal company was fined a very modest amount. But the only person who was criticized in some of the government reports was that lone state inspector who had originally raised alarms. So I was able to find some pretty heartbreaking stories of the families and what they went through during the days of searching through the mines, which really, really highlights just how just horrible the situation was for the people involved. To a certain extent, the story of Centralia and why I come back to Centralia at the end is because Centralia, to me, is symbolic of what we have going on right now, where climate change, global warming is occurring at an extraordinary extent. We have fires occurring, we have famine occurring, we have terrible storms. We have temperatures at record levels. We have what amounts to state inspectors warning that the coal dust is growing and we're not doing anything about it. And again, we are ignoring those warnings at the political level. We're more concerned about getting the political donations from the owners of the operators. And I'm not saying it's coal. Coal is about 10% of the US energy source right now, but it's still a key, important part of fossil fuels. Trump administration says that coal is beautiful and should be built up. And that's a dangerous situation. It's a dangerous situation all the way around. So what I'm trying to say in this book and why I think this book is important is it's important to go back and look at the history and look at all of the history of coal and understand coal and what its picture is. And we need to make some hard decisions here. Otherwise, I don't know if there's going to be an explosion. I don't know what's going to happen. But the future does not look good unless we heed these warnings from people. So that's why Centralia is important at the beginning, is important at the end.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's definitely helpful to remember that history can provide lessons to be taken forward. And it is on that theme of the future that I'd love to ask my final question, which is what you might be working on now that this book is done. If you've got any projects, whether or not they're related to what we've been discussing. Anything you want to flag or highlight.
- [45:27]
Bob Wiss
Well, you know, I really do like to write about environmental issues, but I'm looking into, and I'm talking to a publisher right now about a new book, and it's really a totally different subject. I'm concerned about journalism. I'm concerned about local journalism in particular. Journalism has been my entire career as a newspaper reporter, as a newspaper editor. I was a journalism professor for 18 years, and I. I'm very worried about what's going on, particularly in America, with journalism and how information that was once vetted and where everybody got information that they knew would be correct and accurate. That doesn't happen anymore. And I'm obviously one of many people concerned about it. But I'm hoping to do something about local journalism, which is a little bit different, which would incorporate the sort of lessons that are in the Black Gold book, where. With the Black Gold Book, it's just not a history. Okay. What I tried to do is I tried to write stories, narratives like I just talked about Centralia and other places where. Where I tell a story to be able to explain why something is very important in a way that this development occurred. And I'm going to try and do the same thing, hopefully with local journalism, and we'll see what happens.
- [47:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm sure we will. While you are doing that, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Black the Rise, Rain and Fall of American Coal, published by the University of California Press in 2025. Bob, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [47:24]
Bob Wiss
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.