New Uses for Coal
The Republican Party has historically been the party of status quo – a party which has failed to implement the vision of a growing and vibrant America.
Nowhere is the fatal defect of this policy more evident than here in West Virginia. We have been given glib promises instead of leadership, popular slogans instead of a program.
In a nation where there is relative full employment, where the Republicans think they can run again on the slogans of Peace, Prosperity and Progress, you in West Virginia are still hard hit in your coal fields, on your farms, and in your lumber industry.
There has been a lot of talk about depressed areas. And if that term is applicable anywhere, it is here. Yet to talk of depressed areas, to provide the necessary federal, state and local assistance for those hard hit in West Virginia can only be a temporary solution at best.
Only last Wednesday, Undersecretary of Commerce Philip Ray appeared before a Senate Committee and said the Administration’s policy is to help the areas to help themselves in the solutions of their problems.
Your own Senator Randolph, however, who is keenly aware of the serious problems confronting the economy of West Virginia, labeled these Administration efforts as “too limited in their approach to a very real problem.” With this analysis I concur wholeheartedly. The real solution lies not in talking about depressed areas but in providing an energetic program which solves the basic regional problems at the heart of this state’s serious economic troubles.
Earlier this year in Welch, West Virginia, I spoke of the great hope for this area of the nation which could be obtained through the development of new uses for coal. At that time there was pending before the Congress a bill to establish a Coal Research and Development Commission – to develop new and more effective uses for coal, to improve and expand existing uses for coal and to reduce the cost of coal production and distribution.
This is the type of legislation which provided hope. This is a positive rather than a negative solution. I wholeheartedly supported the enactment of this legislation, as a step toward reviving one of the nation’s key industries. Apparently many of my colleagues agreed (I might say this group included the Republican National Chairman) because the bill was passed by the Congress.
But our hopes – your hopes, the hopes of the industry, the miners and the unemployed – were dashed by the President. He vetoed the bill. He vetoed this promising measure just as he vetoed or threatened to veto much other legislation aimed at meeting some of today’s most critical national problems – in housing, the building of new schools, and the further expansion of vital reclamation and power projects.
In vetoing this bill, the President stated that the Department of Interior currently administers research and conservation programs for coal as well as other mineral resources. But what he did not say is that the current program devotes two-thirds of its research activities to synthetic, liquid and gaseous fuels, which would not benefit the coal mining industry at all.
There are in this sate today some 39,000 coalminers. About ten years ago this figure was 120,000. It is true that some of this decline is due to mechanization of the industry. But it is also true that in a period when our nation is growing – and needs to continue growing to meet the great international threat of an aggressive Soviet power – we have not taken the steps needed to conserve this vital industry by finding new and needed uses for coal.
The fact of the matter is that our coalmines and our coalminers represent one of this nation’s greatest assets – a storehouse of wealth that can and should serve us for centuries to come.
Earlier this month it was announced that a locomotive engineer named Russell Harvey of Roanoke, Virginia, who works for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, has been experimenting with the uses of pulverized coal. Mr. Harvey is convinced that a point has been reached where researchers could develop his ideas to perfection and operate diesel engines with pulverized coal at a cost of one-third the cost of diesel oil.
This is the type of imaginative research which we who backed the establishment of the Coal Research and Development Commission were hopeful could be accomplished. Brought to fruition, an idea such as Mr. Harvey’s could put thousands of coalminers back to work and open hundreds of local mines.
Moreover, we must not limit our sights to the dwindling domestic market and the fluctuating overseas market of 1959. We must bear in mind that the world’s population will be more than six billion by the end of this century, according to the most recent United Nations forecast – six billion people who will need heat and power and the products of our industry. In this nation alone we will double our population by the year 2000, placing greater demands on all of our resources of fuel and energy than any previously experienced or even predicted.
Moreover, the future of coal is not limited to the future of our energy requirements. Perhaps more than any other mineral, coal possesses hidden properties which have not yet been fully explored or exploited. There are new products to be discovered and new utilization of its by-products. Coal could well hold the key to the future of our nation, as well as this state.
But these new and important developments will not come about by the result of our merely sitting back and waiting for them. We need intensive research on the development of our coal resources – far more research than we are undertaking today. And this is but one of the serious issues confronting the Democratic Party when it takes control of the White House in 1960 – which it surely will. Many of these problems are interdependent. Certainly providing homes for 15 million families housed under what the Bureau of the Census classified as sub-standard conditions will have the secondary effect of aiding the lumber industry in West Virginia. Certainly the evolving by the Democratic Party of an effective, positive farm policy – not a policy which is merely critical of the activities of Mr. Benson – will aid the farmers of West Virginia whose annual income has dropped to its lowest figure since 1945.
But we can no longer invoke the solutions of the past – the programs and the policies which served us so well during the last generation. For now the age of consolidation is over – and once again the age of change and challenge has come upon us. We are faced with a whole new set of problems – a whole new set of dimensions. We are at the edge of this nation’s greatest age of expansion, growth and abundance – at the edge of a new era for our nation, our world and all mankind. It is this challenge that constitutes the great portion of our unfinished agenda.
Here at home, we are approaching the day of a two-hundred million population, a five-hundred billion dollar national income, a trillion dollar economy. These trends are recognized in our universities – they are recognized by market analysts and industrial statisticians throughout the country – and they are planning accordingly. But our government – as shown by the President’s vetoes of the coal research and housing bills – is not planning accordingly. And if the future is not grasped quickly, it may be lost to us forever.
Source: David F. Powers Personal Papers, Box 32, "New Uses for Coal, Charleston, WV, 10 October 1959." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.