Five Questions with Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, author of “Company Towns” – The Chicago Blog
In Company Towns, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down.
Elder charts the mining companies’ concerted efforts to hinder the growth of local governments within their reach, deploying outright corruption to reshape the administrations according to their whims. Then, as Elder shows in devastating detail, when the mining companies withdrew, they left behind not just economic decline, but local governments ill-equipped to govern.
Company Towns unpacks how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government among the affected communities, leading to citizens expecting little from public institutions and doubting the usefulness of elections. Elder’s work is a nuanced portrait of a region whose political attitudes are all too often homogenized through a national lens, and this history underscores the consequences of corporate dominance for state capacity, public opinion, and democratic accountability today.
Read on for a Q&A with Elizabeth Mitchell Elder about her revelatory deep dive into the historical roots of public distrust in former mining areas.
Company Towns is a decades-spanning examination of the enduring political effects of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. What were the origins of the project?
I grew up in Indiana, where there are many places that used to be fueled by a single industry—former steel towns, car manufacturing towns, mining towns, even a circus town. These industries have mostly left for good. When people talk about the struggles of these places and their residents’ disillusionment with government, there’s a sense that this all traces back to the industry’s decline. But having conversations and reading local reporting about these places’ histories, I started to get the sense that all was not well in local politics when their industries were thriving. That led me to wonder what governance was really like under single-industry dominance, and what the consequences might be for how people think about the potential of government today—or, more to the point, the lack thereof.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book about how we view what is perceived as deeply embedded cynicism throughout current and former mining communities? How have your own thoughts evolved there as a result of your work?
I hope readers will come to understand that cynicism about government in these places is not ideological, reactionary, or based on misinformation. Local governments fundamentally failed to serve their citizens when mining companies were dominant, and for some time after those companies left town. Cynicism is a rational reaction to the kind of governance these places experienced.I went into this project a little skeptical that local forces, even ones that were historically important, could still matter in the 2020s, when so much of what we think about politics is shaped by national news and context-less online interactions. But the evidence here suggests that people in former mining areas really do have distinctive attitudes about government, consistent with their areas’ distinctive histories.
While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?
I was surprised by how little the quality of local government seems to have changed when coal companies left town. Histories of the years of coal dominance describe mining elites buying votes, driving away organizers, and more subtly shaping government decisions. Yet even after these mining elites had largely disappeared, these same tactics continue to surface in stories of local politics. Vote buying cases were still coming out of West Virginia and Kentucky in the 2000s. I didn’t expect governments to suddenly start functioning smoothly once coal companies were less involved, but I hadn’t expected other local power brokers to so seamlessly keep corruption in local government going in their absence.
Where will your research and writing take you next?
This project convinced me that local political cultures and histories can have deep, long-lasting impacts on their residents. But during the mid-20th century, a huge number of people left their places of origin, leaving mining areas for other parts of the country—for example, in the 1950s, one-third of the living people born in West Virginia had left the state. The South, another region with distinctive local political cultures, has a similar history of out-migration. Going forward, I’m interested in understanding how those migrations shaped politics in the rest of the United States. Did people take their political cultures with them, allowing the distinctive political economies of Appalachia and the South to matter beyond their borders?
What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Politics is for Power, by Eitan Hersh. In my book and my work more broadly, I’m interested in what makes people feel that politics is “for them”—that if there’s a problem facing their community, they are capable of addressing it through collective action. After spending so long on the case of mining areas, where people learned so thoroughly that politics was not for them, it was refreshing and exciting to hear Hersh’s descriptions of people who found ways to work within their communities to make a real difference. The local-level, on-the-ground work Hersh focuses on is far removed from what those of us who spend our free time following national politics might think of as political participation, but it’s the kind of work that I think has the potential to meaningfully increase engagement and trust in places where many people are alienated from politics altogether.
Elizabeth Mitchell Elder is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others.
Company Towns is available now. Use the code UCPNEW to save 30% off when you order from our website.
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