What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

Elizabeth Catte

• Publisher: Belt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780998018874
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"The most damning critique of Hillbilly Elegy."? The New York Review of Books

In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working-class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians.

A much-needed insider's perspective on a deeply misunderstood region of America.

PART I

APPALACHIA AND THE MAKING OF TRUMP COUNTRY

FROZEN IN TIME

On a frosty January morning in 2006, an explosion occurred in a coal mine owned by the International Coal Group in Sago, West Virginia. The explosion instantly killed one miner. Twelve others became trapped by debris, flames, and toxic gas. Their first shift after an extended New Year break had gone terribly wrong. All the missing men were fathers, some to young families, and the world watched as rescue crews tried to pinpoint their location in vain for two days.

Much of the news coverage focused on the anguish of the miners’ families and how their grief reverberated in small communities like Sago or nearby Tallmansville. The families kept vigil at the Sago Baptist Church, just yards away from the mine, and national and international media crews kept watch with them. Sentimental and intimate narratives of faith and resilience overtook attention to the International Coal Group’s notorious record of safety violations and fines.

Forty-eight hours after the explosion, an official working with rescue crews at the mine called the church to deliver news both heartbreaking and miraculous: the body of the one dead miner had provided an important clue in the discovery of the twelve living ones. The official informed families that rescue efforts were underway and activity at the mine intensified as celebrations at Sago Baptist Church became breaking news on every major network. “Their hope dimmed, but they never gave up,” said ABC reporter Sonya Crawford, live from West Virginia.

Some families believed that rescue workers might triage the rescued men in the church and so they reorganized their surroundings as best they could for such a fraught reunion. They prepared and celebrated for three hours until a new report informed them that all miners save one had perished. A reporter for National Public Radio later confirmed that for most of that period, mine officials were aware there had been a grave miscommunication.

Captured on video, the celebrations of the families were frozen in time, and in their rebroadcast became a symbol of cruelty of the highest magnitude: false hope. Unfolding news coverage foregrounded the spectacle of decent but damaged people hoping in vain for a miracle. This made the reporting about the International Coal Group’s lethal labor practices feel distant by comparison. As sociologist Rebecca Scott wrote of the incident, “Why miners might be afraid to report safety violations at a nonunion mine took second place to a story of a tight-knit, deeply religious community tortured on national television by the dramatic plot twist.”

The coal company was indeed villanized by the press for its part in the tragedy, but not for its longstanding record of shirking state and federal safety regulations. The media presented families expressing anger toward the International Coal Group. But that anger was framed as a melodramatic response triggered by grief, not as a series of reactions compelled by the often abusive tension between mine operators and the communities that served as their workforce.

The media coverage of the Sago Mine disaster naturalized many practices in Appalachia that are not natural. It is not natural for individuals to mine coal, although it is a dominant industry in Appalachia and therefore a logical choice of employment. It is not natural for employees to die in the name of corporate profit and it is not natural to recycle the raw grief of devastated families into a spiritual lesson about sacrifice, as reporters did. Journalists sought details from families about dead miners’ favorite scripture passages and analyzed them for clues that might indicate an acceptance of impeding death. It was as if the miners had undergone a meaningful spiritual trial instead of suffocating in the dark with their noses stuck in lunch pails because the rescue breathers supplied by the mine were useless.

When mine safety crews located letters written by the miners just before their deaths, reporters fixated on the last words of Martin Toler, Jr.: “It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep.” A community and a nation seeking any sign of redemption from this tragedy naturalized even this most unnatural of deaths. Other, more invisible signs of redemption happened out of the public eye. Industry watchdogs challenged, in vain as it would happen, regulatory oversight of the coal industry and wrongful death lawsuits wound slowly through the courts.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Appalachians were once again framed as decent but damaged people looking for a miracle. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric centered the projection of a fantasy to “make America great again” by promising to correct the social and economic decline of disadvantaged white workers such as those who once populated the Sago Mine. “My guys,” he often remarked, referring to miners, “don’t get enough thanks.”

Many Appalachians also engaged in fantasies of their own. The mayor of Buckhannon, West Virginia, just miles from the Sago Mine, told the Washington Post that Trump is “going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home.” Every prestige publication from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair flocked to the region to capture a glimpse of the people whom they assumed stood ready to gamble the nation’s political health on a last-ditch effort at self-preservation and, ultimately, false hope.

Following Trump’s victory, pundits often engaged in a projection of a different fantasy, one where Appalachia might be isolated and left to reap what it had sown. For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies. This time, however, there would be no dignity in death. A month into his presidency, Trump appointed Wilbur Ross, the former owner of the Sago Mine, as his secretary of commerce. Some pundits and commenters applauded the decision for its awful symmetry.

For many Americans, the election simply cast “the Appalachian” in a role he appeared born to play: the harried and forgotten white everyman, using the only agency left in his bones to bring ruin on his countrymen and selfishly move our nation backward, not forward. Instead of serving as the instrument of his own torture, his false hope was now weaponized and aimed at the nation.

This projection of Appalachia is melodramatic and strategic in equal measure. It reflects a longstanding pattern of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America” that defies narratives of progress. These narratives, however, are designed to allow you to applaud the casting choice without wondering who wrote the script. We’ll watch the film here, but we’re also going to stay for the credits.

APPALACHIA AND THE 2016 PRESIDENTAL ELECTION

Of the 2016 presidential election, New York Times international affairs correspondent Roger Cohen wrote, “The race is tightening once again because Trump’s perceived character—a strong leader with a simple message, never flinching from a fight, cutting through political correctness with a bracing bluntness—resonates in places like Appalachia where courage, country, and cussedness are core values.”

Cohen’s dispatch is one of many that came to form a distinct genre of election writing: the “Trump Country” piece, which seeks to illuminate the values of Trump supporters using Appalachia—and most often West Virginia—as a model. “To understand Donald Trump’s success,” the composite argument flows, “you must understand Appalachia.” The march of the “Trump Country” genre became especially striking during a fraught election cycle marked by otherwise erratic coverage and scandal on both sides of the political aisle.

Sandwiched between email servers and Access Hollywood outtakes, Appalachians stood ready to offer human interest stories that demystified, or so the press assumed, the appeal of a distinct type of political annihilation. Pundits explained our socioeconomic realities to one another under the guise of educating a presumed audience of coastal elites whom, they argued, had become hardened to the plight of the forgotten American.

It is possible to glean, through the cumulative veneer of political analyses, think pieces, and grim photographs, some truth about the issues that vex Appalachia. But of equal importance is how this coverage reveals what vexes the nation about Appalachia. The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard “Trump Country” think piece.

The emotional politics of this genre cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional “other” who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate. Whether readers find these protagonists sympathetic or self-sabotaging, “Trump Country” writing leaves its audience to assume that Appalachians have not earned the right to belong in the narrative of American progress and are content to doom others to the same exclusion.

I first encountered the “Trump Country” genre in a February 2016 Vanity Fair essay by John Saward. “I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump,” Saward explains in “Welcome to Trump Country, USA.” Saward’s offering is something of a travel dispatch of his accumulated experiences in Morgantown, Clarksburg, and Charleston. It begins with a tableau of Saward fondling a gun in a small-town strip club and ends with homespun mountain wisdom from a drifter. This structure implies that reality lies somewhere in between the maniacal Trump-supporting strip club denizens and the cosmically indifferent drifter. It also suggests that we should prepare for an age of extremes using Appalachia as a preview of coming attractions.

Saward takes pains to emphasize his difference from the subjects of his essay. What sets West Virginians most apart, according to him, is their longing and nostalgia for ordinary things. “You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs,” he writes. “I have never cared as much about anything as this man did about a hot dog recommendation.” When a local provides Saward with a list of restaurants to visit, he shares that “this will keep happening to me, people talking about the decency of other West Virginians and ordinary-seeming food like a dream.”

This dream-walking offers sharp contrast to the realities Saward describes where “everywhere things are leaning, teetering; you might consider this metaphorically, but it is literally true, the houses are breaking.” To collapse this sense of ruined nostalgia into a single anecdote, Saward lists half a dozen crumbling enterprises—car washes, bakeries, auto body shops—named after ordinary people, a “human with a name who had an idea for a place to do a thing and did it.” In “Trump Country, USA,” a car wash closed for the season isn’t just a car wash, but a harbinger of a future when we might all wish for ordinary things in vain.

Early political forecasting compelled Saward and others to visit West Virginia in order to find “Trump Country.” In December 2015, the polling firm Civis Analytics provided the New York Times with data suggesting Donald Trump would perform well in Appalachia and particularly West Virginia, his “best state” according to the Times. A national survey of 11,000 Republican-leaning voters indicated that Trump’s strongest supporters tended to be individuals who once registered Democrat but presently vote Republican, a phenomenon that isn’t uncommon in the South and Appalachia as a holdover from union-influenced politics.

Nate Cohn, who analyzed the data for the Times, argued that candidate Trump was the best fit among individuals “on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition.” The Civis data also suggested, however, that eight out of the ten best congressional districts for Trump were in New York, and particularly on Long Island. Other news sites often highlighted the metrics of Trump’s appeal in West Virginia in early 2016 as well. A FiveThirtyEight report, for example, suggested that many of Trump’s Facebook “likes” came from users in West Virginia.

Examining election predictions in the first days of the Trump administration is like looking at one’s reflection in a dirty mirror. Many polls and forecasts show something recognizable amongst other distortions, and this phenomenon is also true of the “Trump Country” genre, which built momentum as primary season approached and all but exploded after the West Virginia Republican primary in May 2016. It’s important to acknowledge that Donald Trump did (and still does) enjoy strong support amongst many Appalachians and West Virginians. And these supporters often framed their justification by identifying their alienation from both parties, triggered by unmet political expectations and white racial anxiety. None of their positions, however, were unique to Appalachia or West Virginia.

What we know now, of course, is that these narratives employed a sleight of hand that used working-class people to illustrate the priorities and voting preferences of white middle-class and affluent individuals. The Washington Post and other outlets issued correctives, reporting that “the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of mostly blue-collar and white working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with election data.”

To be fair, the Trump campaign, and the continued rhetoric used by his administration, participated heavily in this myth making. Individuals on both sides of the political aisle, however, are reluctant to change the narrative. Months after the election, hastily written diagnostic texts about the white working class, such as Joan Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, were published, creating further entrenchment.

No place demonstrates the uneasy reality of the “Trump Country” genre better than McDowell County, which sits firmly in West Virginia’s historic coal fields and once had the largest population of African American individuals in the state. In our present climate, however, McDowell County is a majority-white community that shares the worst local employment and health outcomes with neighboring coal counties Mingo and Logan.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, McDowell County became synonymous with “Trump Country.” It was the subject of profiles for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Circa, the National Post, CNN, and CBS, with mention in dozens more about West Virginia or Appalachia at large. A widely-shared video segment in the Guardian in October 2016 asserted that “Donald Trump was more popular in McDowell County than anywhere else in America.”

Coverage of past elections told a different story about McDowell County and West Virginia. In 2008, McDowell County was among the few counties in West Virginia where Democrats held on to a margin of victory. A more modest number of reporters and journalists dove into the history of the county and its politics to explain that phenomenon. The documentary Divide, for example, explores the 2008 election through the eyes of union organizer Sebert Pertee, who canvassed for Barack Obama in coal country. In those days, West Virginia was “Hillary Country,” with Clinton beating Obama in the state’s Democratic primary by substantial margins, including in McDowell County, where she won more than 70 percent of the vote.

Obama won McDowell County by 8 percent in the 2008 general election, but lost West Virginia. By 2012, West Virginia was entirely red. West Virginia Democrats appeared so disillusioned with their party that they gave Keith Russell Judd, a federal corrections inmate in Texas, 40 percent of their vote in the 2012 Democratic primary.

It isn’t difficult to locate compelling political angles in West Virginia’s coal country, which was solidly Democratic for forty years. Analysts point to the dwindling strength of unions and the coal industry’s hostility to environmental regulations as the chief political frustrations turning the tide. Both Republican and Democratic state politicians have pushed “war on coal” narratives that suggest industry decline is the product of overregulation, not market forces and competition from cheaper energy. With often little difference among their elected leaders, West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable political indifference to economic diversification.

Economic strategies most often prioritized financial and tax incentives that helped larger corporations and staved off losses to coal company profits. These strategies offered a united message from Republicans and Democrats that the way forward requires the free flow of capital in the hands of businesses, not people. It’s a position that pits workers against the environment in the battle for economic stability. It also accepts that the replacement of permanent and benefitted jobs with unstable low-wage employment is a natural by-product of corporate growth.

Political candidates committed to labor and environmental issues don’t often fare well in West Virginia, not because they’re unpopular with the electorate but because pro-business moderates from both parties invest in their failure. Take the case of Charlotte Pritt, who in 1996 defeated current Senator Joe Manchin in the gubernatorial primary with an anti-corporate-interest platform. Instead of endorsing Pritt, members of the Democratic Party’s elite, including Manchin himself, touted a “Democrats for Underwood” coalition, supporting the Republican nominee. Pritt narrowly lost the election.

Following a hiatus, Pritt has returned to politics, announcing in 2016 her intention to once again run for governor, this time affiliated with West Virginia’s Mountain Party. Pritt isn’t the only candidate inspired by Bernie Sanders’s success in the region. Joe Manchin’s opposition to populists like Pritt helped elevate him to the rank of senator, but he’ll soon face off against Bernie Sanders acolyte and political newcomer Paula Swearengin, a single mother from Coal City, West Virginia. As she told the New Republic’s Sarah Jones, “It’s ti...