Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class
Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class, by Max Fraser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)
Many books have been written about Black migration from the South following the Civil War and Reconstruction. This book examines the movement of White southern residents in the first half of the twentieth century during which eight million White people left the southern countryside for greater job opportunities in the upper South and the industrial Midwest – one of the largest internal relocations of poor working class people in American history.
Reminiscent of the young girls who left their hard lives on New England farms to work in the new textile mills nearly one hundred years earlier, Southern farmworkers, facing depressed prices for farm goods and sale or abandonment of their property due to increased industrialization, moved North for better paying employment, including work in cotton mills.
Improved roads including interstate highways made their journey easier but, unlike Black migrants who stayed in the North due to persistent segregation in the South, the White travelers returned to their homes frequently to visit their families.
The book presents interesting conflicts between the rural transplants desperate for work and the employers who eagerly sought to employ them in the booming industrial centers. Their employers believed that these workers were ignorant, docile and not interested in membership in a union, while the workers turned out to be combative, leading organizational drives in their own way and forcefully – sometimes ignoring union rules against unauthorized strikes.
Another fascinating conflict was in the attitude of the established Northern workers toward their Southern co-workers. They believed that the “hillbillies” were racist, backward and sought to take their jobs. The unions in place at that time contributed to this view by giving preference in hiring, pursuant to “grandfather” clauses, to sons of employees having seniority.
The employers used these cultural disparities and class conflicts to their advantage, playing one group against the other, thereby splitting the ranks of labor and discouraging the emergence of a united labor force.
The book benefits greatly from an extensive bibliography and chapter notes including government studies, industry reports, union records, oral histories and cultural notes such as the importance of country music.
Reviewed by Steven Davis, retired NLRB administrative law judge and board member of the New York Labor History Association.