World War I made the Tri-State district more productive and profitable than ever before. War industry demand for lead and zinc raised prices and wages, and led to the dramatic expansion of mines in the Oklahoma part of the district. Wartime nationalism also supercharged the risk-taking masculinity of the district’s miners who asserted their racist claims to the piece rate with new fervor that further undermined the appeals of union organizers and government health and safety reformers. But in the 1920s miners found their employers, who had grown bigger and stronger during the war, newly reluctant to pay them high wages. This stand-off created new opportunities for union organizers in the district, but Tri-State miners ultimately rejected solidarity in favor of the economic advantages they believed loyal, white American men deserved. By the 1920s, their working-class communities were organized around a faith in capitalism, violent masculinity, and white racism now transformed during the war into a staunch white nationalism. Having abandoned organized labor, Tri-State miners found themselves without allies as mining companies moved in the late 1920s to constrain their risk-taking behavior through new health controls aimed to eliminate silicosis and damaged men from the district.
Keil, Hartmut, and Jentz, John B., eds. German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. 425. Preface, illustrations, index
