"An Upthrust into Barbarism": Coal, Trauma, and Origins of the Modern Self, 1885-1951

Here was something almost without parallel in the history of civilization: not a lapse into barbarism . . . but an upthrust into barbarism. (Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934) Coal is something of a dirty secret in the United States. Even today when Americans appear on the surface to be so firmly committed to an age of petroleum, coal still lights up and heats up much of the country, supplying nearly fifty percent of the electricity that is needed to fuel the high-tech economy, to air-condition the South, and to network homes everywhere. From the modernist lines of the iPhone to the hum of Toyota's emissions-free electric car (the iQ), most Americans remain tied up, that is, in the primitive and dirty business of moving mile-long chains of earth in boxcars twenty-four hours a day (between Wyoming and the East Coast) and to the systematic lopping off of mountaintops and their ecosystems in West Virginia and Kentucky (five hundred mountains and counting). And yet despite coal's strong material presence behind the scenes, coal is not a part of the national self that most of us embrace with enthusiasm: coal as a signifier points back to the traumas of industrialization rather than forward to the future. Coal is less of a dirty secret today than it was a few years ago. Growing concerns over climate change and over the nation's foreign oil dependencies have pushed coal out of the shadows and into the public spotlight. This relatively sudden entrance of coal onto the public stage has produced a fierce debate over the meaning of coal in American life and more than a few awkward moments for coal's boosters- the most notable of which was the spectacular failure in 2005 of a General Electric advertisement that attempted to sell the notion of "clean coal" through the use of erotic images of half-naked male and female miners writhing around jack hammers in a sort of "stylish sex party" down in the mines (Mulkern "Coal Ad Blitz"; Stevens on "Coal Mines Hotter"). That bizarre and seemingly irrational moment ?? the public debate over coal makes cultural sense when we look back at the historic discourse of coal. In promoting the dream of a coal-fired future, coal's boosters have had to confront and to overcome the collective trauma that has ? been associated with coal ever since it first gained a foothold on national life in the late nineteenth century (Figure 1).2 What is clear in turning the clock back to this earlier period in the nation's history- to a time when Americans were first becoming dependent on coal for the production and maintenance of modern standards of living- is that coal functioned at the time as metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche for a dark facet of the modern American self. In the film, photography, art, literature, and nonfiction of the period, coal as a signifier called up from the depths of that self a dark and dirty material underside to the nation's modernity that had been cloistered, socially and spatially, in the subaltern and subterranean locations of the coal mine and the stokehole and a repressed trauma that had been buried mostly out of sight, symbolically and psychically, in a national narrative of progress, consumption, and growth.3 As a cultural object, coal served as a reminder to industrial-age Americans that beneath the surface of the nation's veneer of steel, glass, and light and beneath the exhilarating speed at which its factories, ships, and railroads churned, there always stood this other implacable, barefaced, and hidden material world with its furnace stokers buried in the depths of steamships, its miners sequestered in mountain hollows, its dirty ashes hurried out the backdoor, and its smoke and slag removed beyond the sight and smell of the nation's middle classes. Nothing was darker, dirtier, or more decidedly modern than coal, and nothing evoked so explicitly the traumas of modernity as did this gritty black rock and the trace of its lingering smoke. …