The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800–1940
by Mark Aldrich
Johns Hopkins University Press, 352 pages, $64.95

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. 

For now, it’s worth registering when America leapt from its wood economy and swung into a coal economy. No firm date can be set on such a transition, as Aldrich would be first to point out. Narratively, I’d pick July 7, 1826, just after John Adams’s funeral ceremony in Quincy, Massachusetts, when a selection of officials bore witness to one of America’s first railroad tracks, laid to shuttle granite several miles to the Bunker Hill Monument, then under construction. As Aldrich notes, the railroad and the steamboat were main drivers of American coal consumption. Both ran on timber at first, but only after the energy density and efficiency of coal became manifest did these technologies come to define antebellum America. 

Energy density can be visualized literally. Coal, according to Aldrich, takes up ““about a quarter of the space of its energy equivalent in wood.” As a consequence, a virtuous cycle took root as we introduced coal into our economy: Thanks to coal’s comparative density, a greater energy payload became easier to transport, which then allowed for “greater geographical dispersion,” thus promoting industries reliant on coal instead of timber. This, backgrounded by our geographically expanding rail and steamboat industries and the rising cost of timber, launched America into the age of coal. These dynamics did not hit their inexorable stride until after Appomattox. From then until Armistice Day, the reign of the Black King revolutionized American industry—though his dominion did not endure equally in all industries. 

By 1880, steamboats, which capitalized on the Mississippi and its tributaries, accounted for only 5 percent of all coal use; nearly 90 percent of its fuel came out of America’s coal mines. Though undiscussed by Aldrich, the energy economics of steamboat transport changed for social reasons as well. The Civil War cratered the North–South traffic upon which the steamboat industry relied. The Union’s collaboration with the private rail companies and Ulysses S. Grant’s masterful use of its advantages rerouted trade horizontally across the country, an enormous posthumous victory of Henry Clay’s “American System” of internal improvements. Once America poured coal into this expansion, the results reshaped the country. “About 31,000 miles of track had operated in 1860,” writes Aldrich, but just 20 years later, “the total reached 87,000” with a leap to over 400,000 miles by 1918. Coal consumption grew apace, growing from 13 percent of all coal mined in 1880 to one-fifth of all coal mined by 1918. 

Factories witnessed similar revolutions. Coal quickly ramped up steam engine power production in American factories. “The horsepower of steam engines in manufacturing rose 18 times between 1850 and 1900–from about 450,000 to 8.2 million,” Aldrich writes. By the same year, steam power made up 81 percent of all primary factory power, “which amounted to about 61 million tons” of coal, or “nearly a quarter of all soft coal burned that year.” Throughout this period America bore witness to refinements in industrial chemistry, engineering, and metallurgy that jolted the nation out of its origins as an agrarian republic into an industrial empire–all under the aegis of the Black King. 

However, even at its apex, industry had begun its “long goodbye” to coal, as Aldrich dubs it. In some cases, the goodbyes were shorter than others. 

In waterborne travel, weight is everything; the heavier the craft, the slower it cuts across the water. Oil bunker fuel became an obvious replacement for heavy lumps of coal as coal had replaced timber on trains. While coal hit its peak in the 1910s in other industries, water transport witnessed coal’s near-complete disappearance as a fuel by 1914.

Meanwhile, developments in California presaged coal’s fate in the rail industry. Thanks to the discovery of the Golden State’s bounty of black gold, railways soon took advantage of the cheap fuel oil that came out of the kerosene refining process. This oil fuel was at least of better quality than California coal. “The carriers’ long goodbye to coal began well before the diesel locomotive,” observed Aldrich. 

And for America’s factories, electricity sounded the death knell of steam power’s prominence in manufacturing, which slashed coal consumption. Though it was a relatively long time between Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station and the ubiquity of electric power usage in heavy manufacturing, coal would never recapture manufacturing once the transition took root. 

The tide began to turn against coal when it was at its most dominant. The First World War incited a boom in coal demand that eventually strangled supplies. Winter shortages triggered coal riots in New York; meanwhile utility magnate Samuel Insull threatened to commandeer the industry in the Midwest to purge opportunist price speculators and stabilize the price. Ultimately, the federal government intervened, redirecting coal supply flows away from the East Coast to the more densely electrified and supply-stable Midwest. In turn, the price of coal became high enough that manufacturers abandoned their private power plants and purchased power for larger and more efficient utilities. So much for King Coal’s hold on manufacturers.

This combined with the diffusion of kerosene, oil, and gas into transport further diminished coal’s prevalence. Aldrich dedicates a substantial number of pages to detailing how coal lost out on the homefront, so to speak. Eventually, the economics of electric lighting and gas heating proved too economically and experientially attractive for coal to maintain its grasp on furnaces and stoves. If you’ve ever used the phrase “Now we’re cooking with gas,” that’s the long arm of advertising from this period reaching across the generations to govern your tongue. Ultimately, Aldrich argues, the “fall of coal resulted primarily from the same market forces that had brought it to prominence–the routine workings of a network of individuals and institutions focused on energy production and use and driven by profit motive.”

Coal did try fighting back. Stripmining evolved to drive down the price of coal and to curb the pernicious “wastefulness” that progressives crowed about. On those fronts, stripmining won the battles despite losing the broader war to claw back King Coal’s place in the market. Liquid fossil fuels simply burned cleaner, cheaper, and proved easier to handle than coal. Scientists attempted to derive liquid fuels from coal, though this proved a dead end.

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Aldrich’s broader point with this sweeping history is, in part, to redeem coal. It has been much maligned, despite rocketing Americans out of poverty in a short span of time. Additionally, it was consumers, tinkerers, entrepreneurs, and an overall desire for a life with less toil that crowned King Coal and in turn stripped him of his land and titles. Contrary to the concerns of progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt—Aldrich calls them “resource pessimists” and “market skeptics”—the market incentives stoked the social processes that led to conservation independent of political pressure. The upshot of all this was an energy transition from wood, muscle, and water to coal, hydrocarbons, and electricity. The common parlance in the literature for this shift is an energy transition. 

While Aldrich’s argumentation and evidence within this framework pass muster, one can’t help but wonder whether the framework does his book a disservice. He means to meet the vast body of academic literature on energy, which falls under the “market skeptic” and “resource pessimist” rubric, on its own turf. The “energy transitions” like the one Aldrich describes illustrate how we can “transition” away from fossil fuels altogether in order to fight climate change, so long as we apply appropriate political force. By emphasizing the role of markets (as social processes), Aldrich aspires to undermine such a narrative by demonstrating that markets inspire energy transitions all on their own—and can even steward resources. 

But, panning out, both he and the skeptics or pessimists might both be wrong. We did not stop using wood as we pivoted to coal for fuel. Instead timber could be cheaply deployed in Sears-Roebuck–style homes for the settlement of the West, hastening the manifestation of our national destiny. Likewise, we have not stopped using coal today, though its share of energy consumption has shrunk. This indicates less a transition, where one form of energy wholesale replaces another, and more of an energy addition. In short, moving up the energy ladder merely changes the way we use “older” energy sources; it does not do away with them. Thus, Aldrich may have conceded too much by trying to rehabilitate King Coal in the parlance of his opponents.