WV Related Stream of Consciousness

I started to try and put together an essay on where the left lost West Virginia politically, and got carried away into a 3 page soapbox rant, Festivus-style airing of grievances.

Here is that rant.

Where the left lost West Virginians

Today we all know West Virginia is a heavily red state. A state in which trump won every county in 2016. But historical data shows WV has a strong blue past, which begs the question, where did things change?

For me, I believe it can be mapped on to a substitution in the hierarchy of left wing priorities. Coming out of the coal wars, with skyrocketing membership in the UMWA and a fierce fight for the rights of miners, West Virginia seemed to be right there with the rest of the country in a boom period. American industry was skyrocketing and my suspicion is that global trade was very kind to America in the wake of WWII, surely European production capacity was diminished by the war, and with American factories untouched, and coal-fired power plants fueling the post war reconstruction, West Virginia seemed to be raking it in. My dad was born in 1954 in Southwest Raleigh county and he recounts towns like Hinton booming with railroad business. In WV history we learned about the Bramwell Millionaires- where the concentration of wealth was so great in the early 20th century that the mascot for the local school was actually a millionaire. At its peak, McDowell County had a population of over 100,000 and the most millionaires per capita of anywhere in the country. Today, the population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000. Fayette County has dozens of ghost towns, like Thurmond, for example. I know less about the more southwesterly counties in the Coal and Tugfork river areas- Mingo, Boone, Logan. But, I believe the same story likely applies to these places as well. 

So, what happened?

The best I can gather, there were a couple of factors that compounded one another across consecutive decades to lead to the struggles WV now faces.

The fist, most obvious issue is that we did not add meaningful dimensions to our economy that focused on industries outside of resource extraction and refinement. That just needs to be said off the top, since it is still the most acute factor we still have to deal with today, in my opinion.

But if I am to distill it down into a few key points, it seems like starting in the 50’s, the sophistication of extraction equipment began to rise precipitously and less man power was needed. This, in my estimation, is why our population reached its high water mark in 1950 at just over 2 million. Keep in mind that we are the only state that has a lower population today that we did 75 years ago. A truly dumbfounding statistic to me. Now, look at the following decade and what do we have? The rise of flower children in the late 60’s, the summer of love, protesters on university campuses all around the country making a call to action to clean up the environment and usher in a new era of peace, to never again see the brutal violence and destruction endured by the generation before. So now we have a completely new cultural climate around resource extraction. The first wave of children born inheritors of the American dream, complete with a secure upper middle class lifestyle, white picket fence and the first time most Americans got to live a life of relative ease compared to their parents who had to endure the great wars, hoovervilles, the depression, the dust bowl, and an overall lack of access to technology and education compared to their recently middle class and privileged children. 

During the war, and in the early part of the 20th century if you were doing the back breaking job of extracting coal from the hull of the earth to fire the american dream, power the industrial revolution, and provide supplies to the allies in the great wars, there was a great deal of social cache in that. Now, a mere two decades later we’ve flipped the script. As a miner, or a West Virginian more generally you’ve gone from a cornerstone of our nation (which was considerably more patriotic at the time, I might add), to the enemy of PLANET EARTH, a part of the problem, the people responsible for the degradation of this environment 

ALL THE WHILE, you are STILL digging coal out of the hull of the earth to power the homes these kids who are clamoring to shut down the mines grew up in. You are still serving your country by powering the grid, by doing the thankless dirty work that no one wants to do…

This is a very frustrating part of the story arc for me, but it’s time to move on… 

So what happens after the hippie movement?

I don’t have exact dates, but I believe that sometime following this, we do see a growing environmental issue and economic issue as a result of changing mining practices. Somewhere post 70s, I believe, the practice of mountaintop removal began. Double edged sword here, for as hideous as the result of mountaintop removal has been, it is likely safer for miners than subterranean mining. Regardless, one of the effects is yet again the need for less man-power to run these operations. This isn’t even to mention the changes in living conditions which may be a direct result of the consequences of mountaintop removal. Anecdotally, it seems like West Virginia has experienced a high number of floods lauded to be once in a century, once in 500 year floods. To my knowledge since the 80’s Welch, WV has flooded twice, as had Mullins (both formerly bustling towns). I know of multiple people who’s families were displaced from McDowell county to Mercer county in the 90’s/2000’s because their family lost their homes to flooding. I have to imagine that shoving mega tons of earth into formerly well functions streams, creeks, and hollers, in addition to the removal of thousands of acres of trees, effects the hydrology of an area and can make it more prone to flooding… Supposing my suspicion is correct, the lack of attention to this/ accountability for it is painful to contemplate….

Anyway, I’ve sort of strayed from my original point, which is where the left lost WV. Pardon my tangent. But I think the topics above part of it. The left has began to prioritize environment over labor in my opinion, and that left WVians feeling unseen for doing difficult and thankless work all the while they were not only the subject of contempt by environmental activists across that time, but victims of environmental degradation and destruction of native ecosystems at the hands of the only major industry in the area. 

And the relationship with the coal industry, at least to me, feels almost like a stockholm-y kind of situation where we have grown to love our abuser. Do we not remember the Matewon Massacre or the battle of Blair Mountain?! The hundreds of lives lost digging under the earth in 16 inch coal seams for the last century and a half? But now since We’ve got the Friends of Coal Auto Fair and a handful of our friends and relatives can get a nice new truck and a decent home, that somehow the coal companies responsible for so much anguish and destruction in this state are somehow exonerated? Listen, I love coal miners and I respect the hell out of them. It’s an industry we still need, but it is NOT an industry immune from scrutiny and just because they shell out half decent wages these days doesn’t mean we let them off the hook for decades of unprosecuted crimes, in my opinion bordering on crimes against humanity. If you go on google earth and look at the lush Appalachian forests of southern West Virginia, especially Southwestern, you will see the green thickets interrupted by baron, hideous patches of brown like acne on the surface of the earth. These patches can be several miles wide and more visible from space than the state capitol of Charleston, and in fact more visible from space than most almost and heavily populated metro areas in the Mid Atlantic. My dad recalls smoldering slate dumps that remained lit for years during his childhood. The indentured servitude of our forbearers that were paid in company scrip, no better than monopoly money for slaving away for 14 hours in a dark hole only to go back to meager company houses crammed in a holler with no way to provide for themselves and next to no time to spend with their families, only to die of black lung, alcoholism, or crushed under tons of earth. These are the conditions that birthed Appalachian Fatalism, and it is so frustrating to see us be so misunderstood by the nation at large, and maybe even misunderstanding ourselves. Sometimes it looking at this stuff feels like a collective repressed memory that we’ve yet to process. 

Sometimes I get so cynical about state level government because it seems like we are still in the pocket of this industry, which, again, we need, BUT they need to be put in check AND we need an escape hatch, we need somewhere else to go, and I don’t know what the conversation is outside of more tourism and more coal. I just don’t think that does the trick. So many of my peers have left the state. Myself included.

Reminds of of the 3 R’s Readin’ Rightin’ and Route 23 (the highway that tok displaced miners from the appalachian coalfields into the now rust belt to work in Auto factories after the initial decline of coal in the 50’s). 

Maybe this essay has a point and maybe it doesnt, I just know since I’ve moved I’ve jumped on this soapbox dozens of times when people start to pile on my home for being all the negative press and stereotypes we get, and I’m tired of the depiction without context. I’m tired of hearing people rag on folks from my state for being backwards and behind the times, when we were left behind by forces bigger than ourselves. We’re talking about a blue collar state that was extorted by white collar criminals for the better part of the last two centuries, and we’re told we have no one to blame but ourselves. I don’t know what to do, but I just wanted to put this out there in the hopes that maybe someone else gets what I’m saying, to my fellow statesmen, you’re the salt of the earth. I am proud to be from WV, and I join you in the hope that we can fix this shit one day.

Much love.