Chapter 7

In 1929, employed people in the Upper Midwest numbered 2.3 million, or 37 percent of the total population. By 1980 the numbers had grown to 3.6 million, or 43 percent (Table 4). Throughout the years, employment, with population and income, was one of the most-used indicators of the changing material health of communities and regions. Changes in the description and location of jobs were part of the process of adaptation and transformation in the auto era.

Jobs on the transportation and communication lines, on the farms, and in the mines, factories, trade, and service organizations are all parts of a vast productive system. Maps of circulation and settlement patterns are geographical diagrams of the system. And the purpose of the system is simply to enable people to work together to use the earth's resources and to enhance the quality of their lives. The system is unique because of its size and complexity — and because it is built from the inside by people who are a part of it. Hence, the productive system keeps evolving as part of a continuing quest for a better life, with both the inertia of human institutions and the uncertainty accompanying human curiosity and innovation. In that evolution, commitments and affections for places are always under review—continually tested by changes in the size, wealth, and functions of each community. The world market makes different demands on each place at different times, and the local people invent ways to meet the demands and even to change them. Thus employment keeps changing as the productive system evolves.

A New National and Global Environment

A host of new circumstances in the auto era demanded profound adjustments in Upper Midwest employment. The long-run decentralization of American population and industry from the historic Northeastern core region was accelerated toward the South and West. In that realignment, the region's share of the nation's industry and income increased, while its share of the population declined. But the biggest shifts went to other parts of the country, and the Upper Midwest had to adapt to the emergence of major new market opportunities and competition in both the Southeast and the Southwest. Meanwhile, it joined other American regions in coping with new international opportunities and competition.

Improvements in transportation technology also promoted new job specialization and faster exchange of the nation's growing volume of goods, capital, and information. Waves of new products, services, and knowledge crashed incessantly across the marketplace, and with each wave came opportunities for new occupations and business firms. As a result, a continuous flow of entrepreneurs had to come into the marketplace to organize resources, labor, production, and distribution-to create organizations and jobs.

Dun and Bradstreet counted a net increase nationwide of nearly one million new business firms from 1920 to 1980 (Figure 54). The increment was somewhat slower and much more unsteady than it had been before 1920. But the net growth figures masked a far more turbulent process of business formation, growth, decline, and demise. More than 9 million different firms were incorporated during that 60-year period, but only one million grew to even the very modest size and stability necessary for listing by Dun and Bradstreet. On the other hand, while millions merged, failed, or sold out, hundreds had phenomenal growth and moved up into the ranks of the 1,000 or so largest corporations in the country. Those newcomers, in turn, replaced big-time drop-outs. Of the nation's 1,300 largest corporations in 1920, only one-third were still intact 50 years later.⁷⁶

Table 4. Breakdown of Upper Midwest Employment by Industry Group, 1929 and 1980 (In Thousands)

Figure 54. Growth in the U.S. Population and Number of Business Firms, 1875-1980. Since 1920 the growth rate has become much more variable, and the average number of firms per unit population has gradually declined. Source: note 76.

Figure 55. Absorption of U.S. Labor Force Growth, 1960-1980. In those two decades, jobs had to be created for an unprecedented 37.3 million new entrants into the labor force. Source: note 77.

Entry of the post-World War II baby-boom generation into the labor force provided another example of the complexity of employment growth and change (Figure 55). In the 1960s and 1970s, jobs had to be created for 37.3 million new entrants into the American labor force. Never before had there been anything like that lump for the job market to swallow. Business firms created 20 million jobs, a little more than half the number needed. A million of those were in research and development working on new products to create still more organizations and occupations. Public agencies expanded to absorb another one-fifth. Fifteen percent-about one in every six-created their own jobs. They were self-employed. The remaining 10 percent were unemployed. Those groups, of course, were very dynamic. Uncounted hundreds of thousands of individuals shifted between private corporations, government, and self-employment. They were accounting for a substantial part of the job creation drama—the innovation, organization, spin-off, reorganization, growth, failure, merger. To be sure, ordinary population and market growth accounted for a large amount of employment increase within the framework of existing companies and public agencies. But the organizations that were largest, on the average, in 1960 provided less than their share of the new jobs. The greater share came from the growth of smaller firms and the creation of new ones.⁷⁷

Americans also made some big changes in the nature and location of government employment. Amid fast-growing income and wealth, they raised the level of investment in every aspect of education in an effort to broaden the opportunities for their children in an increasingly sophisticated world. They committed governments to build and maintain a paved road and street system that links virtually every driveway with all others, and to build airports and improve waterways. Thus, the public took over construction and maintenance of way for the greater part of the transportation system. They also created a complex array of social insurance and subsidies in repeated efforts to gain security in a world of increasingly complex financial uncertainty. They supported a sevenfold increase in peacetime military employment in an effort to reduce their insecurity in a world of turbulent, and increasingly visible foreign contacts. Finally, they wanted more and better records and accounting of the changes in population, business, and government itself.

The Upper Midwest did adapt to these dramatic auto-era changes in its environment. Growth in nonfarm employment not only compensated for the 600,000 lost farm jobs but added another 1.2 million in the bargain (Figure 56). Manufacturing employment doubled as a result of both decentralization and development of new products. The number of construction jobs nearly doubled, despite slowed population growth, in response to the region's growing wealth and capital improvements. Retail and wholesale trade employment more than doubled, and service employment tripled, reflecting the nationwide specialization and acceleration of exchange.

Transportation employment declined slightly. Thousands of railroad jobs fell victim to greater efficiency and private auto competition, but thousands of new jobs appeared in trucking, airlines, and utilities. Employment dropped much more in the mineral industries, but it also shifted from the troubled iron and copper ranges to Great Plains oil and coal fields. A remarkable Upper Midwest seedbed and crop of entrepreneurs invented ways to serve not only the regional market but also distant national and world markets. They expanded older firms and started new ones. They created jobs that otherwise would not have been here and income that otherwise would not have come here.

Government employment increased fourfold in 50 years, from 150,000 to nearly 600,000. The share of all Upper Midwest jobs on public payrolls grew from an estimated 7 percent to 17 percent. The public sector accounted for nearly half of the increase in service and transportation and utilities employment. The Upper Midwest was often in the vanguard of government programs in education, transportation, and welfare —perhaps because relatively homogeneous culture and comparatively rapid economic growth made it easier for state populations to act as communities.

Employment adaptation varied from one part of the region to another. Gains and losses were in different locations. The Twin Cities and the other major clusters of urban growth gained 1.4 million nonfarm jobs between 1929 and 1980, while they lost about 200,000 farm jobs from the suburbanization or consolidation of farms —seven nonfarm jobs gained for every one farm job lost. In contrast, in the mining districts 41,000 jobs were added in the services and trade, but 40,000 were lost in mining and related industries. With the help of manufacturing expansion in many medium-sized cities, nonfarm growth more than offset the loss of 123,000 farm jobs in the Corn Belt. Mainly because of increases in the recreation and paper industries, nonfarm employment growth slightly exceeded the loss of jobs through farm abandonment in the northern forest areas. But in the semiarid and subhumid Great Plains, out-migration and farm consolidation were very large, and urban centers were few and widely dispersed. As a result, nonfarm job growth was scarcely half as large as farm job loss.⁷⁸

Farm households decreased from more than one-half million to about one-quarter million in the auto era. Total employment, including hired hands, dropped from 951,000 in 1929 to 364,000 in 1980. The 1980 total included about 250,000 farm operators and a little more than 100,000 other farm family members and hired workers. A small fraction—perhaps 2 percent—of the hired workers were seasonal immigrants.

The farmers who remained after a half-century of transformation were vastly more highly capitalized and productive than their predecessors two generations earlier. Value of farmland and buildings in 1982 was nine times the inflated post-World War I figures of 1920, 10 times the depressed values of the mid-19208. The change reflected the mushrooming in the 1950s through the 1970s of new buildings for livestock, grain and equipment storage, large machinery, cars and trucks, as well as pens, fencing, tanks, drainage or irrigation works, and new or enlarged and improved housing. In the region's cropland corridor from western Wisconsin and northern Iowa to northern Montana, land and buildings on the average fulltime farm were valued at around half a million dollars in 1982. In addition, the average place had $75,000 to $100,000 worth of equipment and machinery. That equaled the value of crops and livestock sold from the average fulltime farm in the preceding year (See Figure 42, Figure 43). The investment in land, buildings, and machinery per farm worker was about $390,000! But two-thirds of the workers were also owners, managers, and executives of their own enterprises.

Figure 56. Changes in Employment, 1929-1980. (4 pages) The bar graphs dramatize the overall employment growth and shift from farming to service, trade, and manufacturing in the auto era. The graphs also point up contrasts and similarities between the different urban clusters and outlying areas identified on the maps. Source: note 78.

With its enormous gross earnings and heavy capital outlays, farm employment continued to undergird a major share of the Upper Midwest economy. In North and South Dakota, Minnesota, and eastern Montana, 70 percent to 80 percent of the economy depended ultimately on the handling and processing of farm products for export to the rest of the nation and world. In the region as a whole, the economy depended perhaps one-third on agriculture, in the Twin Cities, perhaps 15 per-cent.⁷⁹

Yet the 1980s saw growing concern about the future of agricultural employment. The industry depended increasingly on grain exports in the international markets. Earnings were becoming more variable and uncertain. Competition was increasing from other regions of the developed world and from some developing countries. Need for the region's bulging output of grain, meat, and dairy products was still high in many overpopulated, underfed areas of the world, but shipments to those areas generally required American subsidies, and there was always uncertainty about future public support. Farms continued to grow in average size, with an accompanying reduction in the number of fulltime farms and farm jobs. As a result, both rural and urban people felt uneasy about the outlook for family-owned, family-operated farms.

Family farms were believed to be the hearth and bastion of basic values in the society of America in general and of the Heartland in particular. Sheer reduction in the number of farms was threat enough. But beyond that, to many observers increasing size and capitalization pointed toward an inevitable shift away from owner-occupants toward absentee ownership and control by large business organizations. The fears were aggravated during periods of financial adversity.

While the family farms had developed a mythos, they had also played a major, real part in shaping the remarkable transformation of the Upper Midwest in the automobile era. To be sure, the changes in that era had greatly increased the farmers' productivity and their participation in the world's system of specialization and exchange. The resulting increase in gross farm income would have occurred in any case. But the decentralized, local ownership and control of the industry meant that the flow of earnings, expenditures, and savings would be channeled and revolved through the local communities to a much greater extent than would have been probable with more centralized, absentee control, at that stage in American development. On the resource side, soil management practices were probably better than they would have been otherwise, because the majority of owners expected to remain on their land and pass it along to successive generations.

In fact, the region's family farms, with those of the nation as a whole, appeared to be diverging from the historic norm along two different lines: industrialization and urbanization. Neither trend was new. Both had been running throughout the auto era.

On the one hand, farming had become ever more industrial in character—bigger fields, more land, more and bigger machines, more modification of the natural resource through drainage, irrigation, and chemicals. The industrializing units tended to be owned and run by operators who earned most or all of their income from farming. While most still lived on their farms, a significant number of "sidewalk farmers" lived during much of the year in a nearby urban trade center for greater convenience to schools and other services. The number of these fulltime farms dropped by 59 percent from the 1920s to the 1980s.

On the other hand, farming had also become more urban in character. Not only had many farm tasks shifted to the towns; but also growing numbers of farm operators were earning more than half of their income from nonfarm employment (See Map 41). The number of those part-time farmers actually increased about 10 percent between the 1920s and 1980s. The trend reflected the greater accessibility of farming areas to jobs in the towns and cities. It offered an opportunity for increased income as well as increased stability from diversification. The average part-time farmer's total net income, including off-farm earnings, was more than that of the average fulltime operator.

The opportunity to diversify reached both ways. It appealed to farm families with skills that were marketable off the farm, and it appealed to urban workers and their families who wanted to live in the countryside and employ their farming skills. The urban occupations of both groups ranged from laborer to business proprietor to professional. For example, small farmers became factory workers or independent technicians in the towns; urban computer programmers and auto mechanics bought small farms and worked them evenings and weekends. A prosperous farm family might buy an automobile dealership, and a prosperous auto dealer might buy a farm. For what it was worth, many values of the idealized family farm appeared alive and well in the statistical profile of the average part-time farm: self-reliance, large families, children participating in farm work and growing up in the open country.

Part-time farming was growing mainly within commuting range of the region's main urban employment clusters and in the lake and mountain regions. By 1982 the operators who earned most of their living off the farm accounted for one-fourth of the region's farms, 9 percent of the value of land, buildings, and machines, and about 7 percent of the value of farm products sold. Thus, the part-time farms averaged about one-third the size of the fulltime operations.

No near, practical limit to the urbanizing trend in agriculture could be foreseen. Much more farmland could shift into the part-time category if necessary. And the trend seemed to pose no clear threat to the family farm as a social institution. However, the need persisted to adopt large-scale industrialization of fulltime farms yet somehow to maintain family ownership and occupance, decentralized management and control. Thus, the number and character of jobs in the region's most important basic industry depended on creative organization and entrepreneurship.

Despite the transportation and communications explosion, the number of workers operating the Upper Midwest transportation, communications, and utilities systems changed hardly at all from 1929 to 1980 (Figure 57). There was a net decline of 2.5 percent, from 159,000 to 154,000. But beneath the calm statistical surface a metamorphosis occurred.⁸⁰

At hundreds of small and medium-size cities, towns, and hamlets the transformation was gradual and simple. The railroad station agents and the operators of horse-drawn drayage and livery services disappeared. The local truckers graduated from four-wheelers to 18-wheelers and extended their range from the neighboring towns to the neighboring states. Operation and maintenance of the growing electric and phone utilities compensated for jobs lost in railroading. Most of the compensating jobs tended to locate at the county seat, no matter where in the county they had been earlier. Thus, despite many internal changes, the net loss of transportation and utilities jobs was small in most counties. In fact, in 289 of the region's 342 counties, with 54,000 transportation and utility jobs in 1980, there had been a net loss of only 4,000 in the half-century since 1929. A similar substitution of new occupations for old took place in some larger centers. The main rail lines operated sprawling yards and shops at La Crosse, Eau Claire, Mason City, Minot, Grand Forks, Aberdeen, and Great Falls. The confluence of rail lines had given those places much of their momentum in the first place. Now, employment growth in trucking and utilities roughly offset the sharp decline in railroading. Total transportation and utilities employment in those seven cities was about 11,000 in 1929, and it still stood at 10,000 fifty years later.

But the changes were dramatic in a few places. In the Twin Cities and nine new, fast-growing outlying metropolitan areas, transportation and utility employment rose 12 percentage points, from 33 percent of the Upper Midwest total to 45 percent. At the same time, the iron and copper country and highly specialized railroad towns dropped 12 points, from 24 percent of the total to 12. In those cases, too, jobs gained equaled jobs lost. But the gains and losses were located hundreds of miles apart.

In the iron- and copper-mining districts and the Great Lakes ore-shipping ports, employment on trains, docks, and tugs was lost because of larger and faster equipment. Mine and ore dock shutdowns added to the losses. Counteracting growth occurred in trucking and utilities, but it was mainly in the larger centers of population and wholesaling: Duluth-Superior, the Mesabi Range cities, and to a much smaller extent Butte and Marquette. Overall gains compensated for no more than one-third of the losses.

Declines also greatly exceeded gains in the small cities and towns at railroad division points. Those were the places where a single main line broadened to form a swath of 10 or 20 parallel sidetracks that spread over as much land as the town itself. In the 1920s, at those points through trains changed crews, locals originated and terminated, and equipment was serviced. An oversized two-story station housed a cadre of clerks and dispatchers who monitored and directed traffic over a hundred miles or more, by telegraph and handwritten orders. Many of the workers lived in the town, but many of the crews were transient. A two-or three-story hotel near the depot dominated the Main Street facade. Night and day, winter and summer, crewmen crossed the polished lobby floor, paused at the brass cuspidors and tobacco stand, and headed upstairs for some sleep before the next run.

Figure 57. Employment in Transportation-Communications-Public Utilities, 1929-1980. (2 pages) Growth was concentrated at important urban centers on the highway grid. But, in the mining districts and about a dozen smaller railroad centers, it was not enough to offset the loss of railroad jobs. Source: note 80.

On the 1929 map, 24 of those towns were strung along the transcontinental corridor and along the prairie and North Woods lines from Chicago. They lost nearly half of their 1929 transportation employment by 1980. Strong railroad activity continued at Glendive, Montana, and strong growth of trucking went on at a few other places in the group. But the strength of those places fell far short of compensating for the collapse of railroading at Oel-wein and Cherokee in Iowa, Huron and Mo-bridge in South Dakota, Miles City and Three Forks in Montana, Tracy and Staples in Minnesota, and perhaps a dozen more towns.

Of course, the main lines were far from dead. Only the labor force and trackage were cut back. Trackside offices, though smaller, were new or refurbished. Modern electronic communication helped to control traffic over longer segments of line. Hundred-car trains sped between more widely separated, automated yards. Their specialized cars were loaded with long-haul cargo: Upper Midwest grain for Duluth, Gulf, or Pacific ports; Montana coal for the Midwest; Pacific Northwest building materials for the Manufacturing Belt; Manufacturing Belt machinery and automobiles headed west; Japanese automobiles headed east; overseas containers en route from Japan to Europe or from Taiwan to Chicago — and countless other examples of national and international exchange. The locals and the passenger trains were only memories. But fewer, far longer, and heavier trains hauled a greatly increased tonnage as they rumbled through rusty yards on upgraded main tracks.

Seven of the nine fast-growing new metropolitan areas—St. Cloud, Sioux Falls, Fargo-Moorhead, Bismarck-Mandan, Billings, and Missoula —had also been important rail centers. But their smoky yards, roundhouses, and shops were replaced —in other parts of the city—by modern, even more extensive, but equally utilitarian steel truck terminals and blacktop parking lots. In bright but simple new offices, both at the truck terminals and track-side, the ratchet sound of computer printers had replaced the clacking depot telegraphs. Air-conditioning, cable TV, and banks of vending machines in the truckers' caravansaries replaced the stale-air austerity of the trainmen's hotels.

The Twin Cities were the scene of the biggest transformation. Within today's seven-county metropolitan area, the number of transportation and utilities jobs increased from 27,000 in 1929 to 34,000 in 1980. While thousands of jobs were lost in the railroad corridors through the central cities, nearly 2,000 railroad corporate office jobs remained in the downtowns. The airport, with its terminals, major overhaul bases, and airline corporate headquarters, accounted for more than 10,000 new jobs. Trucking companies spawned thousands of new jobs in the central wholesale districts and the Midway, then shifted and expanded into the suburbs. With the development of the Upper Mississippi River locks and dams and the stable nine-foot channel in the 1930s, commercial navigation revived; and the resulting new barge and towboat jobs concentrated at the port of St. Paul. Employment in communication and electric utilities grew with the metropolitan population, reinforced by central offices at the focus of the regional communication network.

By 1980, transportation and utilities employment was concentrated more than ever in the Twin Cities, and the concentration had increased strongly in the fast-growing, smaller metropolitan areas as well. Meanwhile, the transportation and utilities share of employment in all cities showed different patterns: it was about steady in the Twin Cities, while it rose sharply in the fast-growing smaller metropolitan areas and in scores of small cities and towns. The Twin Cities were shifting increasingly to capital-intensive components of the circulation system: air transport, electronic communications, long-haul freight. The smaller cities involved in shipping goods were doing more of the labor-intensive trucking: shorter hauls, smaller shipments, general cargo. As a result of decentralized trucking operations, most of the trade centers outside of the Twin Cities became more specialized in hauling the region's goods than their counterparts had been a half-century earlier. In fact, the number of places dependent on trucking for their living was greater than the number dependent on railroading in 1929; moreover, the dependency on trucking was greater than that on railroading had been. As a symbol of the livelihood of those places, the semi had replaced and surpassed the boxcar.

From the 1920s to 1980, the total number of jobs in the mineral industries declined from over 50,000 to 24,000. Most jobs had always been located in just a few distinctive parts of the region-a few unique natural resource concentrations rich enough and big enough to appear on world maps. To be sure, the sand, gravel, and crushed-rock industries employed several thousand people in the production of construction aggregate at hundreds of widely scattered deposits. More localized were the quarries supplying the region's three cement plants, several brick and tile works, and the parent plant of the country's major producer of granite building-stone at Cold Spring, Minnesota, near St. Cloud. Except for several hundred employees in the granite quarries, those jobs were an integral part of the construction industry within the region. In contrast, the metallic ore and mineral fuel industries in the 1980s were more than ever parts of worldwide industries centered outside the Upper Midwest.⁸¹

Major metallic ore deposits are clustered in the Montana Rockies, the northern Black Hills, and the Canadian Shield. The richest have been the copper deposits of the Butte district in Montana and the Keweenaw Peninsula in northern Michigan, and the iron ores of the ranges around Lake Superior. The most important coal and oil deposits are in the massive accumulation of layered sedimentary rocks that underlie the semiarid Great Plains from the Missouri River in North Dakota to the eastern base of the Rockies in Montana.

Between the 1920s and 1980, copper, iron, and gold mining lost 33,000 jobs, while coal, oil, and gas gained 6,000. Sharp, temporary booms and recessions sometimes obscured the long-term trends.

Copper-mining employment at Butte and the Copper Range locations declined from 18,000 in the 1920s to zero in 1980. The problems were declining quality and increasing depth of the ore, together with competition from foreign areas with comparable or better ore and a fraction of the labor costs. Most of the change came during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, there was a shift to open-pit mining at Butte in an effort to cut costs by taking advantage of the great gains in size and efficiency of earth-moving machinery. But that was still not enough in the long run, as world copper prices kept falling. By 1980 a few hundred jobs remained in the White Pine copper mine and smelter at the eastern base of Michigan's Porcupine Mountains, but those jobs also appeared to be threatened.

Iron-mining employment fell from 30,000 to 15,000 between 1920 and 1980. The industry retreated from the smaller, less accessible deep deposits, even though they were high-grade. As a result, employment of the Gogebic and Menominee ranges —centered on Iron-wood, Iron River, and Iron Mountain, Michigan-fell from 6,000 to zero.

Production was consolidated on the large, shallow ore bodies and open-pit operations, although those ores were lower in average quality. By the 1970s, 95 percent of the production came from Minnesota's Mesabi Range, the remainder from the Marquette Range in northern Michigan (Figure 58). In both cases the industry opened new, highly mechanized mines and invested heavily in very large-scale plants to crush, grind, and pelletize the low-grade ores. The first of the mammoth plants, at Silver Bay on Lake Superior's north shore, was named f or E. W. Davis, University of Minnesota engineering professor who spent his professional life in development of the process. The pellets provided a standard, high-quality feed for the iron and steel furnaces on the southern edge of the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. In 1980 dollars, the plants represented an outlay of 3 to 4 billion—more money than all but the largest steel company could raise alone. Some of the nation's biggest corporations found themselves burying longstanding rivalries in favor of joint venture, to borrow hundreds of millions for construction and equipment. As a result of the change from natural ore to pellets, less tonnage had to be shipped down the lakes, and the average quality rose from around 50 percent iron to 62 percent.

There had been a strong case for investment in pellet plants. The substitution of capital for labor would shift from a larger number of unskilled jobs to a smaller, but it was hoped, more stable, number of higher-paying, more skilled jobs — the end of pick-and-shovel work, the beginning of more operation and maintenance of complex plant and equipment. When the plants were planned and initiated, Cold War psychology was especially pervasive. In contrast with rejuvenated Cold War thinking in the 1980s, greater emphasis then fell on national self-sufficiency. There was no question about the importance of self-sufficiency in iron and steel. The demands of World War II had seriously depleted reserves of high-grade natural ore. But vast reserves of low-grade ore, suitable for pelletizing, would last at least one or two centuries. Everyone concerned agreed that the investment should be made.

The steel industry could behave differently from the copper industry because it seemed to be less vulnerable to world competition. The iron-ore resources near Lake Superior were among the richest and largest known in the world. The coal resources of the Appalachians, not far from the southern shores of Lake Erie, were —and are —the world's largest high-quality reserves for metallurgical purposes. Between the two lay the natural waterway of the Great Lakes. And the southern part of that extraordinary natural complex lay in the path of expansion westward from the Middle Atlantic Seaboard. The result was a combination of market accessibility and naturally endowed production efficiency that was overwhelming.

The southern Great Lakes region had emerged quickly in the late nineteenth century as the dominant center of steel and heavy machinery fabrication in the western hemisphere. A regional oligopoly developed which included finance, management, and labor— protected by seemingly unassailable natural advantages. Not until the 1970s was a challenge visible. The quality of overseas machinery products had become high enough, while labor costs had remained low enough, that the Great Lakes area's natural endowment alone could no longer provide the competitive edge. At the same time, the uncertain price and supply of oil had conspired with foreign styling to squeeze Americans into smaller, lighter cars with a greatly reduced steel content. Growth in the South and West had changed the market position of the Great Lakes region. A potential flood of high-quality natural foreign ore from the tropics was waiting for new steel mill construction in tidewater locations to open wide the American market. Now everyone agreed the Great Lakes region was in big trouble. But by that time the pelletizing plants were built, and so were the homes and communities of the workers to run them.⁸²

Figure 58. Minnesota Taconite Production, 1965 and 1980. By the 1970s, 95 percent of taconite tonnage came from the Mesabi Range. Source: J.R. Borchert and Neil C. Gustafson, Atlas of Minnesota Resources and Settlement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, and Minnesota State Planning Agency, 1980).

Black Hills gold-mining employment has been operating in a still different world environment. The Homestake, at Lead, South Dakota, is America's largest gold mine. The federal treasury has provided a stable market and floor price for its product, although profits have fluctuated with the effects of depression, inflation, and the rocketing in the 1970s of the world price of gold. The labor force has remained quasi-constant in the neighborhood of 2,500 for the past half-century, while the shafts have gradually gone more than a mile deep, and the honeycomb of tunnels has kept expanding.

While ore mining declined overall, the giant American fuel mineral industry expanded in the Upper Midwest part of the northern Great Plains. Montana oil and gas production began early in the auto era in the Shelby-Cut Bank area along the Great Northern High Line east of the Rockies, near Baker in the eastern part of the state, near the Wyoming boundary southwest of Billings, and in the Cat Creek district in the center. In fact, when Jack Dempsey defended his world title in 1923, he boxed not in New York but in the unlikely location of Shelby, Montana—a small farm trade center then in the midst of a free-spending oil boom.

With deeper drilling, improved exploration science, and ever-increasing demand, those early fields were extended, especially after World War II. But the most important developments of the 1940s and 1950s came in the Williston area of northwestern North Dakota. Another burst of exploration and drilling followed the oil shortages and price increases in the mid-1970s. Employment in the oil and gas fields rose from virtually zero to a census figure of more than 4,000 in 1980—perhaps two to three times that many, if all of the directly related business and production services were added. Upper Midwest oil production was about 2 percent of the nation's total.

Long before the oil rigs came to the northern Great Plains, railroads and a few small local companies-and even a few farmers and ranchers—were digging coal and lignite. Immigrant laborers worked the bituminous coal deposits near Roundup, Red Lodge, Great Falls, and a few other locations in Montana, and the lignite deposits at Beulah, in North Dakota's Knife River Valley. Altogether no more than 900 paid employees worked in the widely scattered mines.

By 1980 the number of employees was nearing 3,000 and rising. The old underground mines were all closed. A comparatively small number of miners, working open pits with gigantic excavation and conveyor equipment, were producing between 5 and 10 percent of the nation's coal. There had been major expansion of lignite production in western North Dakota's Knife Valley to supply a half-dozen large, immediately adjacent thermal-electric plants on the regional power grid, as well as a federally subsidized, $2-billion gasification plant to produce synthetic fuel for new pipelines to Chicago and Detroit. More electric power and hydrocarbon conversion plants were planned although soft prices on the world oil market made all plans tentative. Extensive new strip mines had been opened on the low-sulfur bituminous coal deposits in eastern Montana. The major operations were at Colstrip, south west of Miles City, and Decker, southeast of Billings in the Tongue River Basin. The thick seams extend beneath picturesque ranching country and lands of the Cheyenne and Crow Indians. Both centers are less than 50 miles and little more than a century removed from the Custer battlefield. About one-tenth of the coal produced in 1980 was burned at two large generating stations at Colstrip. But unit trains carried the great bulk of the output to power plants in major Midwest markets, where it was mixed with high-sulfur Ohio valley and northern Illinois coal to meet air quality requirements. The largest flow moved from Colstrip to the historic transcontinental Northern Pacific line in the Yellowstone Valley at Forsyth, Montana, then eastward. Unit trains hauled about 1,500 carloads daily into Minnesota, two-thirds for in-state power generation, most of the remainder for shipment from Duluth-Superior down the Great Lakes.

Short-term instability was just as striking as long-term decline. Metallic ore-mining employment has risen and fallen with production and demand. On the Mesabi, for example, average yearly production nearly doubled during World War I, fell back 20 percent at the end of the war, rose 25 percent at the peak of the 1920s boom, dropped nearly 70 percent in the worst years of the Great Depression, rose 500 percent during World War II, dropped 20 percent after the Korean War in the late 1950s, rose 11 percent to the peak taconite pellet production year in 1979, and fell 50 percent by 1983 in the face of recession and the auto-making crisis. Thus, in the early 1950s the mines were working overtime to feed Korean War and Cold War demands piled on top of the suburban growth boom. Managers invented a three-day, 40-hour shift to make it possible to draw commuting labor from farm and forest areas as far away as 200 miles. Commuters shared makeshift sleeping rooms on the Mesabi, attended to affairs back home on four-day weekends. Contrast that with the early 1980s. Then hundreds of unemployed tradesmen from the mines worked on construction projects as far away as the North Dakota lignite fields and commuted back to their Mesabi Range homes and families on weekends. At the Beulah gasification plant construction site, they shared barracks with skilled workers laid-off from southern Michigan's automobile factories, in a symbolic display of the problems of the Great Lakes economic complex and both groups' close linkage within it. The ups and downs have been dramatic indeed.

Meanwhile, Mesabi production has shifted from one part of the district to another as older mines were exhausted and new ones opened (Figure 59). That process began very early in the history of the Iron Range. While production locations were shifting, workers were buying homes and settling down. Increasing numbers of miners were reluctant or unable to move as the jobs moved from one location to another. As population and income grew, shopping and recreation facilities expanded at the larger urban centers, especially Ribbing and Virginia. There was more and more need for mobility along the axis of the Iron Range. At the beginning of the automotive boom around 1920, a Boston-backed electric interurban streetcar line was already 13 years in operation. The locally backed corporate embryo of the Greyhound Bus Company was four years old and destined to drive the trolley line out of business within a decade. By 1980 the electric railway was hardly even a memory. Greyhound was a nationwide bus operation and nucleus of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate based in Phoenix, Arizona. And the state of Minnesota had built —with high priority and federal aid-an expressway to facilitate the still greater number of commuting and shopping and recreation trips along the length of the Iron Range.⁸³

Short-term instability was also a feature in other districts and other sectors of the mineral industry. When they operated, the copper ranges had experienced similar fluctuations in overall employment, internal shifts in job locations and work trips, and a similar streetcar line running much of the length of the Range. Employment in oil and gas boomed with initial discovery in each field and again with the flurry of activity during the energy crisis of the 1970s. It declined after development in each field and again with the weakening of world oil prices and the slowed growth of American energy consumption in the 1980s. The gold mines have experienced less short-term instability, along with their smaller long-term changes. The price of their product was supported after 1933; and gold is really a deeply ingrained social institution, while iron and copper are mere economic necessities. Only a temporary order by the War Production Board during World War II seriously interrupted the steady flow of precious metal and the steady penetration of shafts and tunnels into the bowels of the Black Hills beneath Lead, South Dakota.

Employment trends during the auto era in the mineral industries of the region have been complicated. Different production centers are widely dispersed. Ore production has differed from fuel production. Copper trends have differed from iron, and both have differed from gold. Open-pit operations have differed from underground. The Great Plains have differed from the Shield and the mountains. Timing and technology have been different.