Looking over his shoulder at the 19th century, Henry Adams observed that in that era “society, by common accord, agreed in measuring its progress by the coal-output.” That would have been news to his great grandfather, John Adams, whose letters mention coal only superficially. Likewise for the elder Adams’s peers. These men ushered in political modernity, which, in America, foreran industrial modernity. The real inflection point, according to Mark Aldrich, the author of The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800–1940, was when America transitioned from a largely wood-based economy to one anchored in coal. This was modernity with both barrels cocked and loaded.
Aldrich develops several themes about coal’s impact on America. Primarily, he argues that (aside from noted geographical and geological advantages) our national “energy abundance” has been “socially constructed,” by which he means a legion of entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, advertisers, scientists, etc. brought forth onto this earth America’s great prosperity. The primary vehicle for this social construction was private markets. Corollary to these propositions: As coal permeated our economy, it “almost inevitably raised Americans’ standards of living.”
None of these insights are novel. Where Aldrich attempts to break new ground, he focuses on what may seem a niche gripe. Whereas many energy historians “have emphasized the profligacy of Americans’ use of energy,” Aldrich argues that resource conservation comes part and parcel with energy history insofar as the quest for greater efficiency flows naturally from market economies. In other words, the entire progressive ideological fund from which most American energy history draws is fundamentally bankrupt; the lens through which we view our industrial development would be, as a consequence, greatly flawed. Any political institutions or movement premised on such a perspective could be called into question. We’ll see whether or not Aldrich’s controversial claim meets muster.
