Taconite Dreams

Minnesota's Iron Range offers a compelling case study for examining industrial decline in Jeffrey T. Manuel's Taconite Dreams. The extraction of iron ore in this immigrant mining region in northeastern Minnesota had reached its peak significance to the American economy by the early twentieth century, but the depletion of high-grade ore threatened the future of the industry. A reprieve in the fortunes of the Iron Range appeared after Edward Davis, a professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Mines, revolutionized the iron ore business by perfecting a way to convert taconite, a low-grade ore, into manufactured pellets that could be used for steel production. Manuel outlines the bruising campaign to secure a tax subsidy for the growth of the taconite industry; the effort failed in 1961 but was finally successful in 1964. He reveals the emergence of a new conventional wisdom that saw these tax cuts, not public investment, as the solution for industrial decline. By 1965, steel companies had invested nearly $1 billion in northern Minnesota's taconite plants, but the total number of jobs in iron ore never rebounded to the levels of the 1950s. Taconite thus altered the physical, political, and ideological landscape of northern Minnesota, but it could not permanently arrest the region's economic decline

Archaeology · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Immigration · Iron ore · Mining engineering · Political science · Clay minerals and soil interactions · Engineering · Geological and Geochemical Analysis · History · Research, Science, and Academia